DAY FOUR

Call Milton Douglas Forsythe

The man who answered to his name on the fourth day of my trial was rather short, and a little round, with such an abundance of snow-white hair I’d at first mistaken it for an Andy Warhol wig. It was no such thing, of course, yet even then, as he made his way to the witness stand, I had to think that some of the jurors were briefly of the same opinion. Two of them were bald and one had prematurely thinning hair. How could they not have suspected that Milton Douglas Forsythe was wearing a fright wig?

He was dressed in a beige suit, with a pale green shirt and brown tie, a mix Sandrine called “dirty salad.”

Where had she said that? I couldn’t remember, though it sounded like something from her youth, something said on a bus or a subway, whispered into my ear and followed by a nod in the direction of the poor soul who’d drawn her fire, but also, and as a matter of course, her sympathy.

By the time I’d emerged from this surmise Mr. Forsythe had already been sworn in and identified himself as the Coburn County coroner, an alliterative job if ever there was one.

“How long have you served in this post?” Mr. Singleton inquired.

“I have been the coroner of Coburn County for the past thirty-two years,” Forsythe answered.

We were then treated to the usual list of professional societies to which the coroner belonged and the various training programs he’d attended and from which he had received certificates. This recitation moved us forward in time so that the jury at last found itself in Forsythe’s office on the morning of November 15, when the phone rang.

“It was Detective Ray Alabrandi of the Coburn Police Department,” he informed the court. “He told me that earlier that morning he’d spoken to a uniformed officer about a death that had occurred here in town the night before.”

“Do you recall the name of that officer?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Officer Wendy Hill.”

“And what had Officer Hill told Detective Alabrandi?”

“She’d given him information concerning the death of Sandrine Allegra Madison at 237 Crescent Road. And based on that information Detective Alabrandi thought I should look into it. The death had the appearance of a suicide, he told me.”

Appearance, I thought, yes.

“Detective Alabrandi wanted me to go to the house before the body was removed,” Mr. Forsythe continued.

“Why so quickly?”

“He said there were odd circumstances,” Mr. Forsythe answered. “So he wanted me to launch a formal investigation right away.”

“A formal investigation,” Mr. Singleton repeated. “And what would that entail?”

“Well, first of all, it would halt any effort to dispose of the body,” Mr. Forsythe answered. “Then there’d be an autopsy, of course. Any suspicion of a suicide would immediately trigger an autopsy. But in this case, as I said, Detective Alabrandi asked me to go to the address of the deceased.”

“All right, and did you subsequently go to the crime scene?”

Morty rose. “Objection, Your Honor, 237 Crescent Road is a house, not a ‘crime scene.’”

“Sustained,” the judge said. “Careful with prejudicial language, Mr. Singleton.”

“Sorry, Your Honor.” He returned his attention to Mr. Forsythe. “All right, did you subsequently go to 237 Crescent Road?”

“I did.”

And indeed he had gone to 237 Crescent Road, looking a bit tired, as I now recalled, a man edging toward retirement and with something in his eyes that suggested he’d seen too many dead bodies over the years.

“I’m Doug Forsythe,” he said when I opened the door. “I’m the Coburn County coroner. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

I couldn’t tell if his small sad smile was genuine or official.

“I’m sure you understand that in a case like this,” he said, “a relatively young woman, the issue of a suicide, that the county requires that I make an investigation.”

I’d known no such thing but I said, “Of course,” and waved him into the house.

He glanced about but appeared to register very little, his face expressionless, eyes that told me nothing.

“My wife is down there,” I said with a nod to the corridor.

It was eight in the morning but Forsythe looked like a man who’d already worked a full shift, his movements slow, his gaze betraying none of the considerable powers of observation he actually possessed and about which I’d learned only after he’d completed his report.

“My daughter came home at around four this morning,” I told him. “To be with me, I mean, after I told her what happened. She’s sleeping down the hallway.”

“No need to disturb her,” Forsythe said amiably. “I won’t be here long.” He smiled. “And I’ll try to be quiet.” And with that he’d softly, and quite thoughtfully, padded down the corridor to where Sandrine still lay.

As Mr. Forsythe continued his testimony, I unaccountably thought of my long-deceased mother, the easy way she’d dealt with people, the softness of her voice, how slow to anger she had been. She’d held down a job of killing monotony, and yet, from those small wages, and even after she’d finally divorced my utterly indifferent father, she’d sometimes sent the checks I’d find in the mail from time to time, ten dollars here, twenty dollars there, always with the notation: for my son. It was a memory that returned me to that younger man, so grateful for those small contributions, without bitterness, harboring no resentments, working on a novel I’d titled “The Pull of the Earth” and which I’d described to Sandrine as being about “the tenderness of things,” a man who now seemed far, far different from the one who’d escorted Mr. Forsythe into the bedroom of his dead wife.

“And what did you observe at 237 Crescent Road, Mr. Forsythe?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Mr. Madison met me at the door, where I identified myself. Then he escorted me to a back bedroom. That’s where I found the victim.”

Morty was on his feet again. “I don’t mean to hold things up, Your Honor, but for the record I’d like it noted that Sandrine Madison was a deceased person, not a ‘victim.’”

“Duly noted,” the judge said with a nod to the stenographer. He then turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, please strike the word ‘victim’ from any thought you might have concerning Mrs. Madison. It has not been established that she was a victim of any act, criminal or otherwise, committed by the defendant or anyone else.”

With a feeling of genuine surprise, I found myself rather admiring the exquisite fairness of this, the pains that were being taken to protect me, and to honor during this otherwise inconsequential and decidedly small-town judicial proceeding the august requirements of the Constitution of the United States.

Judge Rutledge turned to Mr. Singleton. “Continue.”

“Now, Mr. Forsythe,” Mr. Singleton began again. “Can you tell us what you observed in the bedroom Professor Madison escorted you to?”

“I found a deceased female,” the coroner answered. “She was in the bed, lying on her back. She was naked from the waist. Whether she was completely naked wasn’t something I could tell because there was a sheet over the lower part of her body.”

For the next few minutes, the coroner recited observations not unlike those of Officer Hill. The room is cluttered. There is a yellow piece of paper beside the bed. He also sees an empty glass “about the size you’d have with iced tea,” a pill container with the cap on, various books scattered about. “And there was a candle burning.”

“A candle?” Mr. Singleton inquired.

“Yes,” Mr. Forsythe answered.

“Where was this candle?”

It was on a small shelf near Sandrine’s bed, I recalled, and I’d put it there because she’d asked me to do it. We’d bought it many years before in Albi, the little French town that had been the last stop on what she had always called our “honeymoon trip,” though we’d been married for almost a year before my spinster aunt died unexpectedly, leaving me with a small behest. We’d thought of starting a little nest egg with this money but had decided on a trip instead. There’d be plenty of time to save money, Sandrine had pointed out, but the chance to travel around the Mediterranean, visit all those fabled places, might never come again.

“A large red candle,” Mr. Forsythe added.

Sandrine had wanted me to retrieve it from a box in the basement. There were quite a few such boxes, and it had taken me some time to find this particular candle. She’d smiled when I finally came into the room with it, taken it from my hand, and rather lovingly turned it beneath the lamp. Then she’d uttered one of her enigmatic remarks: I wish you could retrieve everything so easily.

Retrieve, I thought now, a word Sandrine had no doubt chosen carefully, and which, at least for her, had surely been fraught with significance. But what had she meant? And did I now have to parse every sentence she’d uttered in order to retrieve its meaning?

Rather than enter into this discussion with myself, I returned my attention to the courtroom.

“Was this candle lit?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Forsythe answered.

It was lit because Sandrine had wanted it lit. She’d also wanted it placed in a particular spot on the shelf to the left of her bed. She’d asked me to light it when I came into the bedroom that last night, and, as if ignited by its flame, she’d then launched into her attack, her voice very cold and hard when she said, “That candle, Sam, that little candle, is all that’s left of Albi.”

Singleton knew none of this, of course, so I couldn’t imagine why he bothered to ask Mr. Forsythe about a candle that had no relevance whatsoever to my trial.

I glanced toward Morty and gave him a quizzical look. In response, he merely shrugged, as if to say, Sometimes testimony just goes off track. Don’t worry, Sam, the state will pull the train back onto the rails soon enough.

And Singleton did, dropping the whole business of the candle and returning to the subject of the general condition of the bedroom. He’d anticipated Morty’s rebuttal and established that although a bit in disarray our bedroom gave no sign of a struggle. Nothing was overturned, nothing broken. Under Mr. Singleton’s questioning, Mr. Forsythe told the jury that he saw no bruises on Sandrine’s body, nor any sign that she had ever been physically abused. He used the word “angelic” to describe the features of Sandrine’s face, and it struck me that they’d been exactly so. He then told the jury she’d looked “at rest,” which she surely had, words that immediately returned me to the final moments of that last night’s fury, with what wicked depths I’d wanted never to hear her voice again or defend myself against her accusations, the thrashing wounded bull I’d been.

“Now, Mr. Forsythe,” Mr. Singleton said, “at some point during your visit to 237 Crescent Road that morning, did you have occasion to speak to Professor Madison concerning the death of his wife?”

He had had such occasion, of course.

“Would you tell the court the gist of that conversation?”

“He said that his wife had killed herself,” Mr. Forsythe answered.

“Did he say how?”

“He said his wife must have been stockpiling a painkiller for some weeks.”

“Did he give you the name of this painkiller?”

“Demerol.”

“And did he suggest to you how Sandrine Madison had administered this drug on the night in question?”

“He said that he’d picked up the glass beside the bed and it had smelled of vodka,” Mr. Forsythe informed the jury. “He said that his wife had probably taken the pills with this vodka.”

“Did he say that he was with his wife when she took her own life?”

“He said that he was not.”

Mr. Forsythe went on to reveal additional facts regarding our conversation that morning, none of which seemed particularly notable until he reached the point where, standing at the door, as he was about to leave the house, he’d turned back to me and said, “I noticed a guidebook.”

“A guidebook?” I asked.

“It was tucked just beneath the sheet,” Mr. Forsythe said. “I noticed it when I examined the body more closely.”

I had not examined Sandrine’s body more closely, and so I hadn’t noticed the book at all and told him so.

“What kind of guidebook?” I asked.

“A travel guide,” Forsythe said. “The title was something like Around the Mediterranean.”

“The Mediterranean,” I said softly. “She was probably thinking of the trip we took to the Mediterranean when we were young. It was the travel guide we used on that trip. It was twenty years old, but she never threw it away, I guess.”

“So it was nostalgia, you think?” Mr. Forsythe asked. “The reason she was reading it?”

“I suppose so, yes,” I said. “It was a good time for us. When we took that trip.” I paused, then before I could stop myself, added, “We were happier then.”

Something in Forsythe’s eyes darkened. “I see,” he said. “So she hadn’t been planning a trip?”

“No.”

I was trying to recall the exact words of this exchange when Mr. Singleton suddenly turned, walked over to his desk, picked up our old travel guide, the one Alabrandi had later seized, and handed it to Mr. Forsythe.

“Is this the book you saw in the bedroom at 237 Crescent Road?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And the title is what?”

Mr. Forsythe shifted the book to get a better light. “Around the Countries of the Mediterranean, a Travel Guide,” he read.

“All right, did you later have occasion to take a look at this travel guide?”

He had.

“And did you notice if any page had been marked.”

“The corner of one page had been turned down, yes.”

“And what did this turned-down page mark?”

“A town in France,” the coroner answered.

“Which town?”

“The town was named Albi.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Singleton said. “I have no further questions.”

Morty gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze as he rose from his chair. His hand was big, beefy, and I felt somewhat like a little boy whose father has just confidently signaled him that, despite the unexpected and steadily building odds against it, he will win the game.

“Forgive me, Mr. Forsythe, but would you state again how long you have been the Coburn County coroner?” Morty asked.

“Thirty-two years.”

“And if you don’t mind, would you tell the court how old you are?”

“I’m seventy-one.”

“And just for the record, you did order that Mrs. Madison’s body be autopsied, correct?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And that would be entirely routine, wouldn’t it? It was enough that Mr. Madison had mentioned suicide as a possible cause of death?”

“Yes, that would have been enough.”

“In fact, Mrs. Madison’s age alone might also have been enough for you to order an autopsy, yes?”

“Yes,” Forsythe answered. “Unless her death had been expected.”

I knew exactly what Morty was up to with this line of questioning, of course. He was going to show that had not Officer Hill gotten her “itch,” and subsequently reported it to Detective Alabrandi, then there would have been no reason for the wheels of justice to begin turning as rapidly as they had in my case. This speed had been the result of nothing but a few initial and very prejudicial observations, Morty was saying, and they were but the first of many that had, at last, made Samuel Joseph Madison, loving husband of Sandrine and loving father of Alexandria, the true victim in my case.

“But this mention of a suicide alone wouldn’t have been enough to make you call upon Mr. Madison the very next morning, would it, Mr. Forsythe?”

“Probably not.”

“It was Detective Alabrandi’s phone call that gave you this sense of urgency, isn’t that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And, as you’ve stated, you went to 237 Crescent Road, and after returning from there you ordered Dr. Benjamin Mortimer to conduct an autopsy on the body of Sandrine Madison, isn’t that true?”

“Yes, it is.”

This time, Morty had brought his notes to the lectern. He glanced at them, then looked up. “Now, Mr. Forsythe, would you say that you’ve seen several suicides during your career?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“All right, and from your experience, you’ve learned a few things about what a suicide looks like. It would be fair to say that, wouldn’t it?”

“It would.”

“Mr. Forsythe, did you see anything in Mrs. Madison’s bedroom that indicated to you that her death had been caused by anyone other than herself? By this I mean, did you see anything physical that might have given you that impression?”

Mr. Forsythe hesitated slightly. He was obviously an old hand at giving testimony, and so he knew that this was a heavily loaded question. For a moment, I watched him closely, suspecting that he might find a way to slither out of answering with a flat no, perhaps give an evasive answer, or one more damaging to me. He was, after all, a prosecution witness.

“No,” he said.

“Nothing at all that indicated a murder?”

“No, nothing,” Mr. Forsythe answered firmly.

It was an answer so completely honest and professional that I was quite surprised by it.

And so I offered him a tiny smile, almost invisible, but one I hoped sufficient to express my appreciation for his simple honesty. Subtle though it was, the coroner appeared to see this smile, though he made no response to it that could be read by anyone but me.

“Thank you,” Morty said. “No more questions.”

Mr. Forsythe didn’t look at me as he left the stand but stared straight ahead, and within seconds his “dirty salad” suit was just a swath of beige in my peripheral vision.

I turned my attention toward the judge’s bench. Morty and Mr. Singleton were talking to Judge Rutledge. Then both turned and headed back to their respective tables.

“There’s going to be a short delay,” Morty said. “Singleton’s next witness is just now parking.” He smiled. “Well, the coroner didn’t hurt us.”

I nodded in agreement though I had little doubt that Morty would have said the same even if the coroner had produced whatever in my case would be the smoking gun.

He sat back casually. “So what’s the deal with that candle?”

I shrugged. “We bought it in Albi, a little French town. It was when we were young, that first trip we took.”

“The page your wife turned down in that guide, right?”

“Yes.”

“What’s so important about this town?”

“I don’t know.” I thought a moment, then added, “Well, it’s what started the argument. Sandrine mentioned Albi, and somehow from there we got into that fight.”

“What fight?”

“The last one,” I answered. “The one I told you about, the one we had that night.”

I recalled again the fury of our final exchange, how raw and hurtful it had been, with what ferocity Sandrine had attacked me and with what terrible final statement I had struck back.

“I can’t imagine why Singleton would ask anything about that candle,” I added. “It was just a cheap souvenir. Like everything else on that trip, I bought it with a little money I got after my aunt died.”

I saw something catch in Morty’s brain. “How did your aunt die, by the way?” he asked.

“After a long illness.”

“Were you there when she died?”

“You mean, in the room?”

“In the vicinity.”

I gazed at him bleakly. “For Christ’s sake, Morty, do you think I killed my aunt too?”

Morty stared at me silently.

“No, not in the vicinity,” I said flatly. “My aunt was in Minneapolis. I was in New York.” I glared at him. “If you need any further proof that I didn’t murder my aunt, I’ll try to provide it.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Morty said. He smiled but it was a cold dead smile. “I was just checking, Sam. There is nothing more damning than innuendo, or worse than a surprise.”

“There won’t be any surprises,” I told him. “You know everything there is to know.”

And it was already far too much, as I’d learned by then, far, far more than I would have thought possible before my trial, though I also suspected that Mr. Singleton’s little paws were still at work.

When I looked back at Morty, he had a curious and uncharacteristically troubled look on his face.

“The time line, Sam. When did you leave your wife? The day she died, I mean.”

“I left her twice that day. Once for my afternoon class and, later, for my evening class.”

“The second time you left, that was after you had that fight, correct? When she threw that cup at you?”

“Yes.”

“Where was Alexandria at that point?” Morty asked.

“Why does it matter?”

“It matters because if Singleton got desperate he could call her as a witness.” He saw how surprised I was by this. “You have no constitutional protection against your daughter, Sam,” he reminded me.

“Alexandria would never testify against me,” I said. “Besides, there’s nothing she could testify about.”

Morty’s gaze remained steady. “What about that last fight you and your wife had?”

For some reason, the image that returned to me was of Alexandria making lunch that day, standing in the kitchen, cutting bread. She hadn’t turned when I called to tell her that I was headed for my noon class but only given a short jerk of the knife.

“She wasn’t in the house when that happened,” I told Morty. “She’d gone into town.”

“But she came back after that fight, didn’t she?” Morty asked pointedly. “After you’d already left, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“And so she no doubt said goodbye to your wife,” Morty said.

“Of course,” I said. “But Sandrine would never have told her about that terrible last argument.”

“She might not have had to tell her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s that cup.”

I felt a cold dread. “Yes, the cup.”

“Your wife didn’t clean that up,” Morty reminded me. “You did, remember? You did it after your wife’s death.”

I nodded.

“So Alexandria might have seen it.”

“If Sandrine was still in the bedroom, yes.”

“Did you ever ask Alexandria what she and your wife talked about that last evening?”

“No.”

Morty started to add something else but suddenly glanced back toward the entrance to the courtroom. “Ah,” he said softly.

I turned to see a woman in a dark pantsuit.

“You spoke to her only a few times, right?” Morty asked.

We’d gone over all this previously, but it was clear that even my lawyer doubted either my memory or my intentions, both of which could prove damaging to my case.

“Yes,” I told him. “But the only conversation we had was when Sandrine and I went to her office. And even then she did most of the talking. It wasn’t a conversation, really.”

“And you never met her outside her office?”

“No.”

Morty watched as the woman moved down the aisle, toward the front of the courtroom. Her gait was brisk, like someone used to being on time and quite aware that she wasn’t.

“Well, we’re about to hear what she has to say,” he whispered.

I steeled myself.

“Indeed.”

Call Dr. Ana Ortins

Dr. Ortins was of medium height, with straight, no-nonsense brown hair, and though she was a tad plump for a physician who so often counseled against being overweight, she looked quite healthy on the day she took the stand. I’d seen her trotting around Coburn’s neat little reservoir on occasion, and the local news had often reported that she was running in this or that marathon. For the past few years she’d been our local television station’s favorite medical talking head. In the summer she regularly appeared to remind us to use sunblock, and in the late fall she advised seniors to get their flu shots. On television, she dressed only in solid colors, probably for their slimming effect. Her eyes were large, and I’d known from personal experience that she could make them quite soulful when she chose, a trick she’d pulled off very well indeed on the one occasion I’d actually spoken to her face to face.

I’d never met Dr. Ortins before Sandrine chose her, and during the one office visit I’d made with Sandrine she sat in her snug consulting room, always behind her desk, as she indicated this or prescribed that. At the end of that visit, she tried to look on the bright side of an admittedly dark situation: You have many years ahead of you, Sandrine.

Even weeks later I found I remembered that office quite well. Like other physicians, Dr. Ortins had festooned its walls with the usual array of diplomas and certifications, but to these she’d added a large and very colorful poster of the human body, all its interior parts vibrantly displayed. I’d found something rather macabre in the look of it, a body skinned in this way, and in less solemn circumstances I might have made a quip about them, called her “Dr. Dexter,” or “the serial curer,” or something of that sort. But on the day of our visit there’d been no place for humor, and I’d simply sat with my hands in my lap and waited, Sandrine silent in the chair next to mine, looking, for the first time in her life, oddly broken.

When Dr. Ortins reached the stand she glanced at me briefly, then away as the bailiff approached.

As usual, the preliminaries were soporific recitations of colleges attended, degrees held, length of practice in charming Colburn. Dr. Ortins answered Mr. Singleton’s tedious questions with an amiable, unthreatened air, as if she were applying for a job she knew she would get but already had no intention of taking. She went through her education and training, the fact that she’d specialized in neurology, which was no doubt why Sandrine had chosen her.

A quarter hour of testimony went by before Sandrine at last appeared in Dr. Ortins’s office. She had been alone on that first visit, the doctor told the court. As her office records showed, Sandrine had come in at precisely 11 a.m. on the morning of April 7. Spurred by my subsequent recounting of that morning in Morty’s office, I’d recalled that although the drive to Dr. Ortins’s office would have taken only five minutes, Sandrine had left our house an hour before her appointment and not come home until almost two hours after it, a curious stretch of time I’d thought nothing of before Detective Alabrandi appeared at my door some days after her death, notebook in hand, his gaze a tad distant when he’d made his telling comment: “A few unusual items have turned up,” and to which I’d replied, “About me?” His reply had sent an icy finger down my spine. “No, about your wife.”

Sandrine had been in relatively good spirits the morning she left for Dr. Ortins’s office, though she’d still been unsure she had made the right call in Dr. Ortins herself. Because of privacy issues, I’d warned her to stay clear of any physicians associated with Coburn College.

“You can bet they chatter like magpies about what professor has herpes or AIDS or who takes Viagra,” I told her over breakfast one morning. “They’re like old ladies at a quilting party. They couldn’t keep a secret in a jar.”

For her part, Sandrine had already decided to avoid any doctor whose practice smacked of a “holistic” approach.

“I don’t want some vegan doctor telling me about the benevolence of nature,” she said, “or that a tumor is okay as long as it’s growing.”

I’d laughed out loud at that one but Sandrine had only smiled.

Only smiled, yes, but tensely, because by then she must have been quite frightened of the possibility that something was seriously wrong with her.

The first signs were not much different from the usual changes that occur as one gets older, and since Sandrine was forty-six she’d dismissed them at first. It was several weeks before she’d even mentioned them to me, though I later learned she must have been asking herself why she should have such mysterious weakness in her muscles.

Then, out of nowhere, her speech began to slur occasionally, and for Sandrine this must surely have sent a cold dread through her soul.

She was born of parents already rather old, and who’d died in their late seventies, a few years before, and so she had little reason to fear an early death. And yet, for all that, I’d seen that fear in her eyes the morning she was to see Dr. Ortins, and which I’d tried unsuccessfully to quell.

“You’re fine, I’m sure,” I told her.

She nodded crisply. “Probably,” she said cheerily, then rose from the table and gathered up her things. “Back soon,” she said.

I’d assumed that she was headed immediately for Dr. Ortins’s office, but that had turned out not to be the case, a fact I learned only later from the tightly drawn lips of Detective Alabrandi.

She’d returned at just after six. I’d noticed very little change in her demeanor, a fact that now struck me as rather odd in light of what was presently being said on the witness stand.

“Mrs. Madison was quite alarmed,” Dr. Ortins told the court. “She had been experiencing certain disturbing physical changes for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Over a year.”

Over a year, and yet, as I thought at that moment, she’d mentioned nothing of these changes to me, not one hint of what must have been a steadily growing dread.

“What kind of problems?” Mr. Singleton asked.

Serious problems, as I finally learned, and of whose dire nature the jury was now to hear.

“Mrs. Madison had noticed what she called a ‘constellation of effects,’” Dr. Ortins answered. “I know she used that term because I wrote it down in my notes.”

“Why did you write it down, Dr. Ortins?”

“Because it suggested to me that Mrs. Madison had been doing her own medical research,” Dr. Ortins answered. “And frankly, when I know a patient is doing that, I’m a little more careful in how I approach things with them because they may have gathered some quite incorrect information, usually from the Internet.”

“But that was not the case with Mrs. Madison, was it?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“No,” Dr. Ortins answered. “Mrs. Madison had done quite good research.”

“And had she come to any determination with regard to her research?”

“If you mean by way of self-diagnosis, then yes, as it turned out, she had,” Dr. Ortins answered. “Of course, I didn’t know that her research had generated a correct diagnosis. You need several tests to determine that.”

“And did you order those tests?”

“Yes. I did an electrodiagnostic, which included electromyography and a nerve conduction velocity test. Also the usual blood and urine tests, including high-resolution serum protein electrophoresis, thyroid and parathyroid hormone levels . . .”

She seemed suddenly to realize that her answer had overshot the question by half and she quickly brought her answer to a halt. “Along with other tests, of course,” she added.

“All right, so what was the diagnosis that resulted from those tests, doctor?”

“Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”

“That disease has a more common name, doesn’t it, Dr. Ortins?”

“Yes,” Dr. Ortins answered. “It’s more commonly referred to as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

Hearing those words again, I couldn’t imagine that for weeks before seeing Dr. Ortins Sandrine must have had them fluttering like bats in her mind. Even so, she’d certainly given no indication of so dark a suspicion. Not even the afternoon she’d returned from her first visit to Dr. Ortins. Of course, there’d been a reason for that, as the doctor made clear.

“But on her first visit to my office, I assured Mrs. Madison that it was quite unlikely that she had ALS,” Dr. Ortins told the jury. “There are many reasons why a person can feel muscle weakness, and as for the occasional slurring she’d noticed, that is sometimes the result of fatigue. Although Mrs. Madison didn’t appear tired in that way, she did seem . . .”

Here Dr. Ortins stopped, a pause that focused my attention because she was clearly searching for the right word.

“Sad,” she said, when she found it.

And so my wife, so lovely, so brilliant, still quite young and probably healthy, with a marriage that was by all outside appearances quite happy, had seemed “sad” to Dr. Ortins. How in all the months and weeks and days before she appeared in the good doctor’s office, I asked myself suddenly, had I not seen that?

And what, I further asked myself at that moment, would have made Sandrine sad?

Mr. Singleton did not ask Dr. Ortins this question, because he knew that it would be leading the witness or calling for a conclusion, and Morty would no doubt object, and his objection would certainly be sustained.

For the next few minutes, Dr. Ortins reviewed the results of the tests she’d ordered, along with her analysis of the test results, and finally the awesome certainty to which she’d come and of which she’d informed Sandrine on the afternoon of April 12.

“I told her that her initial self-diagnosis was unfortunately the correct one,” Dr. Ortins said. “She, of course, already knew the prognosis. Even so, as I would with any patient, I detailed the likely progress of the disease and how Mrs. Madison might prepare for it.”

“Did Mrs. Madison appear to be interested in how she might prepare?”

“Yes,” Dr. Ortins answered. “She asked quite a few questions. And, of course, she was interested in just how long she had to live. I told her that she might well live another ten years, and that during that time there might be some breakthrough in medical research. She asked about this research, and I went into some of the work that was being done.”

“Did Mrs. Madison say anything else to you at that point, Doctor?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Only one thing,” Dr. Ortins answered.

“And what was that?”

“She said she didn’t want to die,” Dr. Ortins told the jury. “And that she intended to live as fully as she could to the last breath.”

Mr. Singleton was still watching the jury when he very pointedly asked Dr. Ortins his next question.

“To the last breath. Those were Mrs. Madison’s exact words?”

Nor did he turn from them when she gave her answer.

“Her exact words, yes.”

Only two hours or so after Sandrine had said this to Dr. Ortins, I’d returned from my classes to find her in the bedroom in the darkness: Come back later, Sam.

Which I had done, though by then she’d left the bedroom, so that I’d found her in the scriptorium, sipping a glass of red wine, reading a biography of Cleopatra.

“What would make a woman a true queen of the Nile, Sam?” she asked as she closed the book.

“Courage, I suppose,” I said. “Daring. What do you think would make a woman a true queen of the Nile?”

“The ability to face the truth,” Sandrine answered. “To try to change what there’s still time to change and accept what you can’t.”

I laughed. “That’s from the serenity prayer, isn’t it?” I asked. “Have you been going to AA meetings?”

She watched me silently, and her expression told me everything.

“It was something bad, wasn’t it?” I asked. “From the doctor.”

She nodded.

“What is it?”

“I have Lou Gehrig’s disease,” she said flatly.

With this news, I’d experienced that famous cliché, the sense of being hit very hard in the stomach. But was it at that very moment, I asked myself now, as Dr. Ortins continued her matter-of-fact testimony, that I’d begun to run the awful scenario of what was to come, the profound changes that lay ahead, all of them quite dreadful?

“Are you sure?” I asked her. “Is the doctor certain about the diagnosis?”

“Yes.”

I offered no response to this, and during the following silence I saw something in Sandrine’s eyes change, and with that change a terrible sadness settled over her, one so profound she seemed physically to deflate, as if all the light and air had suddenly left her soul.

“I have to think things through,” she said in a voice that struck me as suddenly very distant, something said to herself and whose meaning she alone understood, so that she looked as if she’d just received a blow somehow deeper and more wounding than her diagnosis, something that smelled even more of death.

“Think what through?” I asked.

Rather than answer, she glanced down at the book she’d been reading, let her gaze linger there for a moment, then looked up at me and said, “I wish I had something to leave you, Sam.” She watched me closely, as if she were looking for some small light in a steadily darkening room. When that light failed to appear, she said, “I was thinking of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The way George stares off into infinity and says, ‘Sunday. Tomorrow. All day.’”

“Why that of all things?” I asked.

“Because when he says that, he’s really lost hope that anything can change,” Sandrine answered. “That’s the hope I don’t want to lose.”

When I reached over to touch her hand, she drew it back quickly and reflexively, as she might have drawn it back from a wasp or a spider.

“You won’t lose hope,” I assured her.

Something very strange had come into her eyes at that moment, I recalled now, a look I’d never seen before, half fear, half care. Then, just as suddenly, her gaze had hardened into determination. “No,” she’d said firmly, “I won’t lose hope.”

Dr. Ortins was closing in upon the last of her testimony by the time this memory played out, but what lingered in my mind was the fact that I’d been certain Sandrine had been speaking about her illness at that point, the fact that she hadn’t wanted to lose hope that Dr. Ortins might be right in telling her about the research going on, the possibility that there might, indeed, be a breakthrough.

My question now was simple. Was that what she’d meant or had she been speaking of some different hope she’d feared to lose? Hope for herself? For Alexandria? Or had it been some unspoken hope she’d had for me?

I thought suddenly of the candle from Albi, how Sandrine had asked me to place it exactly on the spot where its light would play directly on the glass jars and bottles she’d later put on the table beside her bed. Why had she done that?

So many odd questions were emerging now, a debris washed up by my trial, questions that were subtle and unfathomable and which in some way were beyond my guilt or innocence of the crime for which I was charged.

Mr. Singleton, however, had a very different question on his mind.

“When did you next see Mrs. Madison?” he asked Dr. Ortins.

“She came to my office with her husband,” Dr. Ortins said. “I went over what would be expected in the coming years, the work of the caregiver in a case like this.”

“And that’s a lot of work, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Why is it a lot of work, doctor?”

“Because a person suffering from ALS becomes increasingly unable to care for herself.”

“And so Mrs. Madison would become more and more difficult to manage, isn’t that true, Doctor? On a day-to-day basis, I mean.”

“Yes,” Dr. Ortins answered. “I explained to Mr. Madison that his wife would begin to lose her ability to use her muscles.”

“In the end her muscles would entirely desert her, correct?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“With a few exceptions like blinking her eyes, that’s true.”

For the benefit of the jury and to emphasize this dreadful point, Mr. Singleton now took Dr. Ortins through the grim steps of Sandrine’s horrifying decline.

“So, in the end, Mr. Madison would have to feed his wife?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Bathe her?”

“Yes?”

“Even take her to the toilet?”

With this question, I noticed several members of the jury turn to look at me, a grim surmise already in their minds, I felt certain, the grave possibility that I’d plotted then carried out the selfish opposite of euthanasia, a murder motivated by my simple desire to rid myself of the loathsome tasks that would soon be mine.

“Yes,” Dr. Ortins answered.

“So what it comes down to is that during this office visit you informed Mr. Madison that his wife would eventually become completely unable to carry out any of the physical functions of life, did you not, Dr. Ortins?”

“That’s what I told him, yes,” Dr. Ortins answered. “And I warned him that he might become depressed. That almost certainly he would, in fact, become depressed.”

Mr. Singleton glanced at his notes, studied them a moment, then looked up. “When did you next see Mrs. Madison?”

“I never saw her again.”

Mr. Singleton gave every appearance of being surprised by this.

“She never returned for any sort of treatment or consultation?” he asked with a show of almost childlike wonder.

“No.”

Mr. Singleton walked to his desk, retrieved a small square of paper, and handed it to Dr. Ortins.

“Do you recognize this, Doctor?”

“Yes. It’s a prescription. I wrote it for Mrs. Madison.”

“But I thought you said you had no further contact with Mrs. Madison.”

“I didn’t,” Dr. Ortins said.

I knew what was coming because Mr. Singleton now turned toward the jury so that he could see its reaction to Dr. Ortins’s answer.

“Then how did you happen to write this prescription?” he asked.

“I was contacted by Mrs. Madison’s husband,” Dr. Ortins answered. “He called and said that his wife was having quite a lot of back pain. Very severe, he said. Debilitating. She had fallen, he said, and he thought perhaps she’d compressed a vertebrae or something of that sort. He said she needed something strong.”

“But this ‘fall’ was never confirmed by Mrs. Madison?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“I never spoke to Mrs. Madison,” Dr. Ortins told the court. “Only to her husband, when he called to tell me about her fall, her pain, that she needed something strong.”

“Now, Dr. Ortins, have you had occasion to read the pathologist’s report on Mrs. Madison?”

“Yes, I have.”

“So you are aware that Dr. Mortimer could find no sign of a back injury in his examination of Mrs. Madison.”

“I have read his report, and, yes, he found no back injury.”

“Is it fair to say that when Mr. Madison told you of this back injury, he was not telling the truth?”

Morty got to his feet. “Objection, Your Honor.”

“Sustained,” Judge Rutledge said. “Please rephrase the question, Mr. Singleton.”

Mr. Singleton nodded. “Dr. Ortins, did Professor Madison give you any instruction as to what sort of pain medication his wife’s back injury would require?”

“Only that it should be something strong.”

Mr. Singleton was still watching the jury when he repeated, “Something strong?”

“Yes.”

“And did you prescribe a strong painkiller for Mrs. Madison?”

“Yes,” Dr. Ortins answered. “I prescribed Demerol.”

Mr. Singleton paused for a dramatic moment, then said, “I have no further questions for this witness.”

During cross-examination Morty did his best to minimize the effect of Mr. Singleton’s final few questions to Dr. Ortins. I knew that nothing prior to those questions could possibly have cast suspicion upon me, but at the very end of her testimony a dark curtain had parted and Morty clearly feared that the jury might have glimpsed something sinister behind it, the first, shadowy suggestion of a crime.

For that reason, Morty led the good doctor through a series of questions, all of which were designed to make her answer in the simple affirmative.

Is it common practice for you to write prescriptions without seeing the patient?

Is it common practice for you to do this at the request of a patient’s spouse?

Is it common practice for you to prescribe Demerol for severe back pain?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Then Morty switched to a series of questions designed to make Dr. Ortins answer in the negative.

It wouldn’t be unusual for a patient in the first stages of ALS to fall, would it?

In such cases, it also wouldn’t be unusual for such falls to result in an injury, possibly a serious one to the back, would it?

For that reason you weren’t at all surprised to hear that Mrs. Madison had fallen, were you Dr. Ortins?

Or that she had injured her back?

Or that her husband was the person who conveyed this information?

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

“So you didn’t find anything at all unusual with regard to your writing a prescription for Mrs. Madison for Demerol at her husband’s request, did you, Dr. Ortins?”

“No.”

Then, a few, final questions.

“Dr. Ortins, have you had other patients with back pain?” Morty asked.

Dr. Ortins sensed trouble. Cautiously she said, “Every doctor does.”

“That’s true,” Morty said. “And have you had patients who’ve complained of back pain and, despite your best efforts, you’ve not been able to find the cause of that pain?”

“That’s sometimes the case, yes.”

“Have you ever prescribed Demerol for such a patient?”

“Yes.”

At that point, Morty faced the members of the jury in exactly the same way Mr. Singleton had faced them minutes before.

“It is possible for a patient to need medication for a back ailment or injury that medical science cannot find, isn’t that true?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

Now Morty, in a tone designed to replicate in every vocal nuance Mr. Singleton’s earlier statement, concluded with “I have nothing further for this witness.”

It was all quite masterful, as well as wonderfully theatrical, and it seemed to me that Shakespeare would probably have made a lot more money as a lawyer. As Dr. Ortins left the stand, I couldn’t help but imagine what stunning addresses to the jury the Bard would have made.

The stern look in Morty’s eyes warned me that a slight smile had slithered onto my lips.

“Stone face,” he whispered like a father disciplining a child. “Keep a stone face.”

I looked down quickly, duly scolded, then lifted my head slowly.

“Sorry,” I whispered back to him, though there was something in this little episode that had pierced me, the fact that Sandrine would have understood my smile and returned it to me. There’d been a time when I’d had no further questions for that smile. But now I wondered if it would have been one of shared amusement or the fingerprint of some old regret. “You see through everything, Sam,” she’d once said to me. I’d taken this as affirmation of my disdain for all that I considered saccharine or sentimental, my peals of laughter, so to speak, at the death of Little Nell. Sandrine had meant it differently, however. For her it had signaled a core change she’d perceived in me “But whatever happened,” she asked softly, “to the tenderness of things?”

It was a question that once again returned me to those long lost days immediately after we’d met in Washington Square, the slow walks, the inexpensive dinners, the evenings of cheap wine and quiet talk, how in that distant time the goal of her education had been contained in her dream of passing it along, founding a little school somewhere, a vision of her life Sandrine had perhaps never entirely abandoned.

On that thought, I recalled the dingy loft I’d had on Avenue A in those days, how Sandrine had often spent the night with me there. Toward dawn on one of those nights, she’d quoted a line from Love’s Labour’s Lost, how, when asked the purpose of study, Ferdinand had replied that its purpose was simply to bequeath those treasures of heart and mind which, without it, would be lost.

Heart and mind, I thought, and with those words felt the gallows floor creak beneath me.

“Sam?”

I looked at Morty, who was staring at me approvingly, clearly pleased by the grim expression on my face.

“Much better,” he said.

Lunch Break

I watched as the members of the jury left the courtroom to take their lunches. By then I’d noticed that, when court was in session, they behaved like ideal students, listening even to the dullest testimony with the attentiveness and seriousness I’d once given to my long dead novel, and considerably deeper than any I’d later offered to the rudimentary needs of my struggling students. According to the results of their judgment I would either live or die, and I could see that this burden did, in fact, weigh upon them. Sandrine had often referred to Pascal’s observation that the lion’s share of mankind’s many evils derive from the simple fact of not being able to sit quietly in a room, and as the last of the jurors disappeared into the adjoining chamber I sensed that collectively they would achieve this stationary thoughtfulness.

Once they were gone, I made my way to the little room where I’d decided to have my lunch while my case went forward.

Some weeks before, Judge Rutledge had set my bail at a scant $50,000. I was a forty-six-year-old tenured professor of English literature with no criminal record, thus not at all, according to the judge, a flight risk. For that reason, I might have had lunch anywhere in Coburn, but I’d not availed myself of that freedom save for the day of my arraignment, when I’d casually strolled to a local sandwich shop. On that occasion, there had been a sufficient number of stares from the townspeople to cut through my usual obliviousness, and since then I’d taken my lunch in the small conference room down the corridor from the courtroom. Morty often joined me there, so that it was in this room some days before that we’d gone over the jurors’ responses during the voir dire phase of my trial and at last selected the five men and seven women who had moments before filed out of the courtroom, not one of them casting a glance in my direction.

Morty came through the door a few minutes later, looking quite pleased with the morning’s proceedings. He smiled, sat down, and opened his briefcase.

“Let’s go over something one more time,” he said. “Just to make sure there are no surprises.”

A surprise could come from only one quarter, so I steeled myself for yet more painful questions.

“April Blankenship,” Morty said.

Imagine a strip of parched wood, dried by a hundred desert suns, a stick of kindling that had never felt a match, and you would have April Blankenship when I met her.

“We’ve been over all this many times, Morty,” I reminded him wearily because it was a ground seeded with land mines and I didn’t want to cross it yet again.

“True,” Morty agreed. “But I want to be certain, because without doubt at some point Singleton is going to call this woman to the stand and I need to know about anything and everything she might say to the jury.” He looked at me pointedly. “Or read that story you sent her, the one you wrote.” He drew in a somewhat labored breath. “My guess is that it was getting his hands on that story that was Singleton’s tipping point as far as making a case against you.” He shook his head. “Too bad April didn’t burn that fucking thing. I mean, hell, it was just a story, for Christ’s sake.”

I instantly recalled the drizzly afternoon when April and I had been in bed together, her mention of how I was always reading, a remark that had somehow wound me back to my own past literary efforts, and to which she’d replied with a harmlessly sweet plea that I write something, as she’d put it, “for me to read.”

“It was a novella,” I corrected grimly.

Now I recalled those late nights in my college office, tapping out my tale of escape in serial e-mails to April, she the one who’d provided an eagerly appreciatiative audience for my work at last, my grand vision for “The Pull of the Earth” now reduced to a mocking pot-boiler imitation. It was an idea I’d once spoken of to Sandrine, to write a parody of noir fiction. She’d dismissed it out of hand, then put her finger on the deeper problem I’d failed to recognize. “Disillusionment is a shabby gift, Sam,” she’d told me bluntly. “Isn’t that what Fitzgerald said?”

April had thought it a fantastic idea, however, and so I’d tried my hand at it, the result of that effort now no doubt resting snugly inside one of Harold Singleton’s desk drawers.

“The problem, of course, is that it’s about a man who kills his wife so he can run away with his girlfriend,” Morty reminded me. “And so you have to admit that in the context of what happened it could be a tad incriminating.” He shrugged in a way that was clearly designed to calm my obvious agitation. “But look, Sam, I know you never intended to run away with April Blankenship,” he added.

This was certainly true, but at that instant I found myself once again beneath the sheets with April, talking about the novel I’d struggled to write for years but never finished. How sweetly she indulged my maudlin tale of artistic woe, then quite softly asked me to conjure up a tale just for her, the writing of which she seemed to take as a great honor, thus a request my vanity had found it impossible to deny.

And so I had penned a novella I’d felt certain she would have destroyed at the end of our affair, but which, quite unaccountably and to my complete surprise, she hadn’t.

“Now once again, Sam,” Morty said, “you were past this affair before you even heard about your wife’s diagnosis, right?”

“I hadn’t seen April for three months by that time,” I answered. “And I was never alone with April again except for that one time.”

Except for that one time.

With those words, I saw her again at my door, thin as air, with her lips tightly pursed, glancing over her shoulder as if she feared she’d been followed, whispering despite the fact that there was no one around: You’re not going to tell them, are you, Sam?

“The one time she came over after Sandrine’s death, right?” Morty asked. “That’s the time we’re talking about?”

“Yes.”

“And other than that last encounter, you’d had nothing to do with her for almost a year before your wife’s death?”

“Nothing.”

Morty had now fully taken on the role of Mr. Singleton, who would soon be my relentless cross-examiner.

“Now, Sam, by ‘nothing,’ I am to conclude that you have not seen this woman, nor written to her, nor called her, correct?”

“Correct,” I answered.

“You understand that the state can present a case for dual motives,” Morty said. “Or should I say interlocking motives, one reason egging on another, that sort of thing, until . . . I’m sure you get the picture.”

We’d been over this many times, and so with confidence I answered, “Yes, I get the picture.”

“One of them he can never prove, of course,” Morty assured me. “By that I mean you wanted to get rid of your wife because she was going to get more and more dependent upon you, and you wanted to escape that burden and get on with your life.” He paused, then added, “The other motive is April.”

It struck me that April had always been “the other,” the one passed over or discarded, whose feelings were not considered and whose loss of dignity had never mattered to anyone save to her husband, poor cuckolded Clayton.

“April is the ‘other woman,’ after all,” Morty added.

The “other woman” is a label that could not possibly have seemed less fitting to this gossamer ghost of a woman, but the web of life entangles us all, and it had now ensnared April, who, by the time of Sandrine’s death, had certainly felt herself well beyond the reach of so catastrophic a scandal.

Even I had expected that she would escape notice, no matter what inquiry might be made into the manner of Sandrine’s death. It had been a tepid, short-lived affair, with little excitement and no love at all, cheap and tawdry, as bland as the rooms in which we’d met on those listless afternoons. April’s last words to me had perfectly summed up the lackluster nature of our trysts. “I can never let myself go, Sam,” she’d said with a shrug as she got into her car. “What can you do, if you just can never let yourself go?”

Other than the time she’d showed up at my door, I’d last seen April about a month or so after learning of Sandrine’s illness. She’d been standing outside Waylon’s drugstore as I’d driven by. She’d been wearing the same blue dress and digging into the same black purse from which, on our first rendezvous, she’d shyly withdrawn a pack of condoms.

I’d pressed down on the accelerator and the car bolted ahead. I’d been terrified she might glance up as I sped away, but in my rearview mirror I’d seen that she was still rifling through her purse. I made it to the corner and was rounding it when she finally lifted her head, but she was still close enough for me to see that it was her car keys she’d been looking for, a blue Toyota that was already three years old when I met her, a car a lot like April, made for routine chores. That she’d ended up in a cheap romance with one of her husband’s colleagues could not have surprised her more, though I think she might have taken some fleeting plain Jane pride in bedding the man who was bedding the far—from every point of view—more desirable Sandrine. You could be with her, she’d asked with every awkward, self-demeaning glance, so why are you with me?

I had not once, either before or after this ridiculous affair, been able to answer that question in any way different from the way Sandrine had answered it with regard to her own father’s serial philandering with a series of increasingly unattractive coeds: it doesn’t take much to fill a hollow man.

“It was nothing, Morty,” I blurted. “That thing with April. It was never love. It was never anything.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Morty interrupted by way of dismissing any further discussion of April’s complete innocence in regard to my current situation. “The point will be for the jury to think you’re a shit.”

An opinion Mr. Singleton will no doubt harden into utter ire, I thought.

“Ruth made us a couple of tuna sandwiches,” Morty said casually as he took a paper bag from his briefcase. “No mayo on mine.” He laughed. “For obvious reasons. But I think she put a little on yours.” He handed me one of the sandwiches. It was wrapped very neatly in tinfoil.

“Singleton still hasn’t exploded those bombs from the pathologist’s report,” he added. “I thought he might take Dr. Ortins through some of those troubling details, but other than the business of that back injury the state has decided to hold fire.”

“Singleton’s like some hack mystery writer, isn’t he?” I asked. “He can choose whomever he wants to narrate his story.”

Morty took a bite from his sandwich.

“He’ll probably pick Alabrandi to do the heavy lifting,” he said. “He was the lead detective on the case, after all, and besides a cop is always a good choice.”

“Why?”

“Because the jury is likely to have heard cop narratives before,” Morty answered. “They read those books you just mentioned. Cop books. Mysteries. Whatever you call them. And in those books, cops are often the ones telling the story, right?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I told him.

Morty laughed but it was an edgy laugh. “Just don’t let the jury know you turn up your nose at their reading material, okay, Sam?” He went back to his sandwich, took a large bit, and chewed slowly. “Anyway, my guess is that Alabrandi will be on the stand for a very long time. He’ll probably tell us everything the pathologist didn’t with regard to your wife.”

After that, we ate more or less silently, then I walked over to one of the long benches and lay down. There were still a few minutes before my trial resumed, and for the past two days I’d been plagued by a lingering weariness, along with a curious indifference to the books and music that had once formed the pillars of my inner life. I hadn’t been able to think as quickly as I once had, either, and yet I’d come to feel that my thinking was growing deeper and more curiously seeded with poignant memories. One thing was certain, things that once mattered no longer did and in their vanishing they’d created more space in my mind. It was strange that by radically confining my life, Sandrine’s death, along with its dire consequences, had in some way expanded my consideration of it.

“Yeah, good, take a nap,” Morty advised. “You need to look rested.”

I closed my eyes and, as always, I thought of Sandrine.

It had been a few weeks after her fateful consultation with Dr. Ortins. She had continued to teach, but the terrible news had been steadily sinking into her, the dreadful facts of her disease. We were sitting in the scriptorium. The first chill of autumn was in the air, and there was a small fire crackling. Sandrine was in the big, overstuffed chair, a checkered blanket over her legs, reading. I was on the sofa, doing the same.

Suddenly the book slipped from her hand, but rather than reach for it she simply stared at it a moment, then looked at me. “I’ve been thinking of my first published article.”

It had been written not long after she’d graduated from the Sorbonne, and she hadn’t spoken of it since.

“The one on Blanche Monnier,” she added softly. “You remember?”

“Yes.”

On the morning of May 22, 1901, an anonymous letter had arrived at the police station in Poitiers, a small town in west central France. The letter advised the authorities that a woman was being kept against her will at 21 rue de la Visitation. According to the letter, she had been locked in a room, half starved and living in her own filth, for the past thirty-five years.

The following afternoon, police arrived at this address and demanded admittance. After some resistance, they entered the house, searched it, and on the top floor found Blanche Monnier. She was fifty-two, and she had been imprisoned in this room, sleeping on a putrid mattress, since the age of eighteen.

In her article on the case, Sandrine had written with particular reference to Blanche’s mother, the aristocratic Madame Monnier, her determination to prevent her wayward daughter from marrying the penniless suitor with whom Blanche had fallen in love. Sandrine had seen it all from a feminist perspective, of course, Madame Monnier almost as much a victim of patriarchy as the daughter she had imprisoned, an approach that made her article seem terribly dated now, a piece of work that would be remembered, if at all, only by way of a time capsule.

I didn’t say any of this to Sandrine, of course.

“Why would you be thinking of Blanche Monnier?” I asked.

“Actually, I wasn’t thinking of her,” Sandrine answered. “I just happened to remember that André Gide wrote about her case, and that got me to thinking about how he once told someone that the tragedies of life amused him.” Her gaze was quite penetrating. “Not that they moved or tormented him. Not that they broke his heart but simply that they amused him.”

“What interests you about that?” I asked.

A smile struggled onto her lips, then withered. “His heartlessness.”

“What about it?”

“I was wondering if there would have been any way back for him,” she answered.

“Back to what?”

“Back to feeling something for people,” Sandrine said. “Particularly people who are in trouble or who aren’t very smart.”

With that, she’d risen, drawn the robe more tightly around her body, then walked out of the scriptorium and into the kitchen, where I’d found her later sitting alone at the little table that looked out onto the backyard.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m afraid, Sam.”

“Of course, you are,” I said.

As she continued to look at me, her gaze took on an aspect of terror, and though she’d never said it I realized that it was me she feared, something in me.

What could she possibly have glimpsed in my eyes that had frightened her so, I wondered now. Was it something that had alerted her to my own dark thoughts so that she’d known at that horrible instant that the first of the state’s perceived motives had been by far the most powerful one, that even then, weeks before her death, I’d been thinking grimly of what was to come, how the house would eventually be converted into a hospital room, everything shoved over to make way for a metal bed, for aluminum stands hung with transparent plastic bags, this house become a place of tubes and drips, the toilet fitted with a raised seat, every available surface covered with medicines, rubber gloves, tissues, cotton balls, plastic drinking bottles sprouting plastic straws, the whole horrid sprawl of invalidism. And not just invalidism, but a horribly protracted death that would stretch into the indefinite future, a death not in one month or two or even three but one that might go on and on, with the whole process of dying getting worse every single day for years and years and years.

Sunday.

Tomorrow.

All day.

A voice finally broke the silence that had descended upon me in the wake of this chilling recollection. It was Morty’s.

“Wake up, buddy.”

I opened my eyes.

“Yeah, okay,” I muttered.

Morty’s expression alerted me to the fact that he had glimpsed something he didn’t like. “You all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said crisply.

But I was not, because my mind had returned to an earlier vision, Sandrine seated in the scriptorium, looking oddly like the invalid she was doomed to become, her legs wrapped in a woolen blanket, her eyes fearfully in contemplation of her own frightful future, one I knew I was destined to share. Was that the first time I’d asked myself in dreadful, scheming earnest: Is there a way out of this?

I looked at Morty and was relieved that he’d seen little or nothing on my face of what was in my mind. Luckily, he’d been too busy lifting his own enormous frame from the chair.

“Show time,” he said once on his feet, then added, “Jesus, I have got to lose some weight.”

Call Gerald Wayland

I had known Gerry Wayland for almost twenty years, though only as the pharmacist who filled our prescriptions. In his friendly manner, he’d dispensed the usual warnings and advisories. Take this before meals; take that after them. This pill is sleep inducing, that one may cause agitation. Either entirely dutiful or absurdly literal, Gerry had even occasionally warned against our operating heavy equipment. But other than this comic observation what did I know of Gerry Wayland, despite the many years I’d “known” him?

Not much, really.

I knew that he was married and had two children, both of whom had graduated college and now lived in distant cities. I knew that his wife was bowling ball round and cherubic, wore big hats, had enormous, pendulous breasts, and had once owned a children’s clothing store. In one of the few conversations I’d had with Gerry, he lamented that his wife’s business had been “murdered” by Walmart. This was the only killing I had ever heard him mention, so it struck me as ironic that the wheel of circumstance had brought him here to give testimony concerning a crime he could not possibly have imagined before I was accused of it.

As Gerry lifted his right hand and swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but, I noticed how nervous he was. Clearly he hadn’t wanted to be here. He’d always seemed a somewhat shy man, and so I suspected that he found the all too public role he had to play in my case faintly distasteful. For that reason, he would no doubt go about it like the guy who straightens the sheet after the actors have left the set of a pornographic movie, that is to say, at arm’s length. Without question he had every reason to consider his testimony of little relevance, though Mr. Singleton had surely given him a clear idea of the piece he had been called to add to the puzzle of my crime. I was sure he would give this evidence quickly and matter of factly, then return to the clean, well-lit pharmacy where substances are less volatile and their side effects both better known and better controlled.

For the next few minutes Gerry, as had all the witnesses before him, established his professional credentials. He had been a pharmacist for thirty-three years. His degree was from the Mercer University College of Pharmacy. He was certified by the state board and was, of course, duly licensed to dispense drugs within the boundaries of the sovereign state of Georgia.

“This is a prescription from Dr. Ana Ortins,” Gerry told the court.

He kept his eyes on a small, square sheet of paper, one of several Mr. Singleton held in his right hand.

“Now, Mr. Wayland,” Singleton said, “can you tell us the date of that prescription?”

Gerry did so.

“And what is it a prescription for?”

“Demerol.”

“And for whom is this prescription written?”

Sandrine, of course.

“Do you recall who gave you this prescription?”

Here Gerry’s eyes flashed over to me, then away.

“Sam Madison,” he said. “Her husband.”

Mr. Singleton let this sink in before asking his next question.

“Have you had occasion, Mr. Wayland, to go back over your files and see exactly how many prescriptions for Demerol you filled with the name of Sandrine Madison written as the patient?”

Gerry had done this, of course.

“How many did you find?” Singleton asked.

“Three. Each with two refills.”

“Now it’s customary for anyone picking up a prescription to sign for it, isn’t that correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“And have you had occasion to review your records as to who picked up the prescriptions for Demerol that you filled for this patient?”

Yes, he had done this.

“Who signed for them, Mr. Wayland?”

This time, Gerry’s gaze remained on Mr. Singleton.

“Sam Madison.”

“Was there any occasion when Mrs. Madison picked up her own prescriptions?”

“No.”

Mr. Singleton smiled mirthlessly, then turned to Morty. “Your witness.”

Morty rose but did not approach the witness stand. This gesture was meant to show that he didn’t consider Gerry’s testimony of sufficient weight to require him to press his mountainous bearing in upon the witness. His questions carried this purposeful trivialization a few steps further. They were quite similar to the ones he’d earlier asked Dr. Ortins, and in answer after answer Gerry affirmed that there was nothing unusual, or even of note, with regard to the fact that I was always the one who’d picked up and signed for Sandrine’s prescriptions.

“In fact, isn’t it true, Mr. Wayland, that had you detected anything of a suspicious nature with regard to the filling of these prescriptions you would have been required—by law—to notify authorities of that suspicion?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Gerry answered.

“Well, did you notify any authority with regard to any matter having to do with Mrs. Madison?”

“No.”

“So, in fact, Mr. Wayland, you can say categorically that you had no reason whatsoever to suspect any unlawful activity on the part of Mr. Madison or anyone else with regard to the death of Mrs. Madison, isn’t that true?”

“Yes, that is true,” Gerry answered.

It was the answer he had to give because he was an honest man who’d previously sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. For this reason he must tell the jury that nothing I did had raised the slightest suspicion in his mind. He declared this in a clear, strong voice, but as he did so his gaze returned to me, and I saw just how great the distance is between what a man must say as a matter of law and what he harbors in his heart.

It wasn’t until the end of the day, however, long after Gerry had finished his testimony, then been followed by a few other “pointless fact witnesses,” that at last I’d gotten the chance to raise exactly that point with Morty.

By then court had adjourned for the day, and both Morty and I were standing in the nearly empty courtroom.

“Gerry Wayland thinks I killed Sandrine,” I told him. “But, of course, so does the whole town.”

“It’s only what the twelve people on the jury will come to believe that matters now, Sam,” Morty said. He added nothing to this as he gathered up his things, then headed out of the courtroom, I at his side, keeping pace with him until we exited the building, at which time he stopped and said, “Well, good night, Sam.”

We were standing on the steps of the courthouse, the streets of neat little Coburn busy below us. I could see its shops, the park with its bandstand, the slides and swings and whirligig. Postcard America.

“I guess I thought I was trapped,” I said softly, a remark that had seeped from me like heating oil from a tiny crack.

Morty’s eyes whipped over to me. “Trapped?”

“My life,” I explained. “The way it had turned out. Teaching at Coburn College, living here. It all felt like a vise. It was tightening every day. That’s why I did it, Morty.”

My lawyer’s eyes narrowed and everything in him, from the largest muscles in his body to the smallest capillary, tensed. “Did what, Sam?”

“That thing with April Blankenship,” I answered. “It was that I felt trapped in this little town and so—”

“Just don’t show any of that to the jury,” Morty interrupted, his voice not at all stern this time but filled with a relief that the “what” I’d just confessed was not the murder of Sandrine. “They live in this town, and most of them, Sam, don’t feel your contempt for it.”

Contempt seemed a harsh word, but I realized that contempt really was what I’d felt for this little town with its modest liberal arts college.

As if whispered by the air around me, I heard Sandrine’s voice, repeating one of the many dreadful things she’d said to me on that last night: Failure is a cold bedfellow, isn’t it, Sam?

Trapped, I repeated in my mind as Morty lingered beside me on the courthouse steps, rifling through his briefcase. But this time, as if on the wings of that word, I suddenly flew back in time to find myself in the bedroom of 237 Crescent Road. Sandrine was reading in bed, the room very much as Officer Hill would later see it, scattered with learned detritus, piles of books and papers beside the bed, peeping out from under desks and chairs, rising in jagged towers from every available surface. We’d lived so much like a couple of scholarly vagabonds that Alexandria had kept her room sparkling clean and well ordered as a gesture of teenage rebellion. It was an erudite chaos I’d worn as a badge of distinction, a proud disorder that had let me feel that I was different from the rest of the faculty. I’d even referred to our colleagues as “the Republicans,” though few had ever voted for anything but the Democratic slate.

Sandrine had looked up from this literary dustbin, her head cocked slightly, so that I thought some phrase from the Pavarotti aria playing in the background had suddenly struck her. But the thought that had occurred to her had had to do with Pavarotti’s person, rather than his song.

“It’s said that Pavarotti once asked his teacher what it took to be a great singer,” Sandrine said. “The teacher answered that it was ninety percent great singing. But that the final ten percent, the part that lifted great competence to grandeur, was something else.”

“Really?” I said. “And what was this something else?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think it would still be there, even if he didn’t sing.”

The topic of this conversation was way too abstract or magical or just plain woo-woo for my thinking, and more or less to bring it to its conclusion I said, “So it could never go missing, I suppose.”

“No, it could go missing,” Sandrine said. She leaned forward and snapped off the music. “The question is whether it could be gotten back.”

I quickly ran back the calendar, and it was clear that Sandrine and I had had this exchange only a few days after she’d gotten Dr. Ortins’s diagnosis, obviously a time during which she’d been going through a very difficult time, the “thinking things through” she’d earlier spoken of.

The snap of Morty’s briefcase brought me back to the present.

“Alexandria’s waiting,” he said.

Dinner

I headed down the stairs and got into the car, but this time I made no effort to engage Alexandria in conversation and so we’d gone all the way home in near silence.

“Go in and relax,” she told me as she pulled into the driveway. “I’ll bring in the groceries.”

I did as I was told, and to aid in the relaxation I opened a bottle of wine and walked into the kitchen, where for some minutes I was lost in undefined and inchoate thoughts, shards of memory whirling about like bits of paper in a mental storm.

“Drinking already?” Alexandria asked after she’d gotten a whiff of my breath. “You haven’t even had dinner yet, Dad.”

“It was a stressful day,” I answered by way of explanation.

“There are going to be days a lot more stressful than today,” Alexandria responded.

She looked at me as if I were a shark fin she’d glimpsed in the distance, something scary moving slowly but inexorably toward her. I couldn’t help but wonder if she were thinking that now might perhaps be a good time to get out of the water.

Rather than face so final an abandonment, I began to unpack one of the grocery bags she’d lugged in from the car. She’d bought fruit and vegetables and several salmon fillets, all very sensible. She’d obviously noticed that I had begun to go to seed, everything sagging as if invisible weights hung from my cheeks and jaw and eyebrows.

She made no comment about this, however, but simply and quite methodically began to put away the groceries.

“You can cut the zucchini,” she said.

I drew a kitchen knife from one of the drawers and went to work. For an instant she looked at the blade warily, as if it were the pistol introduced in Act I and thus must inevitably reappear before the curtain falls.

“Not too thick,” she instructed.

She is very methodical, my now half-orphaned daughter. The vege­tables go into the vegetable bin. The bread goes into the breadbox. Our domestic chaos taught her to value design, it would seem. She has seen the whirlwind that disorder sows, and she will have none of it in her life, not even in the buttons and the bread.

She is right, save in one thing, I decided, the fact that moderation is possible, even in disarray. One can know, as Jean Cocteau once noted—this yet another learned reference stolen from Sandrine—how far to go too far. But where along time’s famed continuum, I asked myself, should I have reined in the tiny nipping angers and frustrations that were ceaselessly tearing at me? And had Sandrine seen that, although outwardly calm, on the inside I was a thrashing pool of piranha?

Time now hurtled backward, as it had when I’d stood on the courthouse steps with Morty, and I found myself in the NYU library reading, of all things, Paul Verlaine, no doubt to impress Sandrine.

She glanced at the book as she came toward me. “Paul Verlaine threw his three-year-son against a wall,” she said, “during an argument with his wife.”

I closed the book. “I didn’t know that.”

Sandrine’s dark eyes were motionless. “You would never get that angry with me, would you, Sam?”

“No,” I said. “There would have to be something missing in a man to do something as cruel as that.”

“Something missing, yes,” Sandrine said.

Had she sensed that missing thing in me, I wondered, sensed it or something worse, actually saw it with devastating clarity as I faced her in the scriptorium all those years later, casually brushing off an anecdote from the life of Pavarotti while the sword of Damocles swung closer to her by the day?

“Dad?”

Alexandria was looking at me oddly because the knife in my hand had suddenly gone deathly still.

“You’ve stopped cutting,” Alexandria said.

“Oh, sorry,” I explained. “Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“Your mother’s mind,” I said with an infinitely fragile smile. “How knowing she was.”

She looked at me sourly. Such talk only irritated her now and in her eyes made me seem hopelessly oblivious to how things had turned out.

“Finish cutting the zucchini,” she told me.

I remembered the earlier conversation I’d had with Morty, his questions about Alexandria’s whereabouts on the day Sandrine died, and particularly the nature of any conversation they might have had. For a moment, I thought of asking her outright about that conversation, but I stopped myself because I feared that Sandrine had, in fact, told her all the hateful things she’d said to me, and I was in no mood to hear them repeated.

A few minutes later we ate dinner in the same nearly unspeaking way in which we’d earlier driven home from the courthouse, and after that I retreated to the scriptorium with a glass of wine.

At around ten I returned to the kitchen and put the glass in the copper sink. It was an old sink, hand hammered, and it had the rough, uneven texture of things made by hand. I’d barely noticed it until the ­afternoon—this now two weeks after the consultation with Dr. Ortins—I’d come upon Sandrine standing before it, peering into its battered basin. She’d looked quite lovely, framed by the window, her dark hair flowing down her back. But I’d long ago gotten used to her beauty so that was not what stopped me. Rather, it was the way she’d reached down and run her fingertips over the pits and gouges as if she were seeking something precious within them, a tiny jewel of some sort, minuscule as gold dust.

I’d assumed that she was thinking about her illness, the horrid way it would progress, all the powers that were at that very moment diminishing and would continue to diminish until they disappeared entirely. There really is a sorrow beyond words, and I suspected that in reaching into that copper basin Sandrine was touching that deep place.

When she sensed my presence, she turned and faced me. “I’ve made my decision,” she said.

I’d felt quite certain I knew exactly what that decision was, and had felt, God forgive me, a surge of relief that she had made it, that she would not put herself—or me—through years and years of grim decline.

But now, rethinking this scene, feeling the ghost of Sandrine’s hands on my face, recalling the dark glint in her eyes as she made this announcement, I no longer felt so sure that I knew what her fateful decision had been, or even if it had been about herself at all.

How long the nights have become without her, I thought suddenly, or with her only in my memory, only as a ghost. If she were here, I realized with a truly tragic irony, I would discuss my case with her, go over all that led up to it, all that has been discovered as a result of it, and where it all might end. During the slowly moving hours I would describe the little quakes that have shaken me during these few days of my trial, along with what they have revealed about the woman for whose murder I stand accused, how this grave accounting has returned me to those first years with her.

On that thought, I abruptly remembered a morning in Antibes. The day before we’d been at Neapolis, in Siracusa, where we’d tested the famed acoustics of the Ear of Dionysius. Sandrine had thought the story of Dionysius having been able to hear his slaves hatching plots against him by means of their voices bouncing off the exposed stone quite unlikely, and she’d been right. I’d stood at the point said to be perfect for transferring sound to that tyrant’s hearing and whispered, “I’m going to kill you,” and Sandrine, stationed at the king’s listening post, had heard no word of murder.

Remembered joy is a heartbreaker, especially when the long view holds future tragedy, but at that moment I found myself quite rejoicing in this memory of Sandrine, the sweet life we’d led in those early days.

Thinking of that distant time returned me to music, and for a moment I considered putting on a CD and playing Sandrine’s favorite piece, “Air on a G String,” a musical title that, given its inherent double entendre, she’d always found rather funny. But simple as it is, Bach’s little air is decidedly classical, and so I recalled Morty’s caution, and I wondered what might be the effect should some errant member of the jury pass within hearing distance of my house. Would those gentle, meditative tones be detrimental to my case, further proof of my elitism, my snobbery, the ethical morass into which my life was sunk, and which, taken collectively, had created a man so lacking in moral boundaries that he could easily slide into murder? I could almost hear the cautionary didacticism that would emerge from any of my so-called peers’ consideration of all this, the fact that life is not a mountain or a valley but the slippery slope that leads from the heights of one to the depths of the other. I knew they’d put it just that way, use me as an example of how badly a life can go wrong.

The doorbell rang.

When I opened the door, he smiled.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

I looked at my neighbor Carl Santori and saw the product of his many ailments. He has lost one kidney and has had bypass surgery, and for these reasons I had certainly expected to outlive him. This is an expectation I can no longer entertain, however. In the words of Mr. Singleton: “The plot was too cruelly premeditated and carried out over too long a time not to warrant death.”

“Honestly, Carl, I never know,” I answered.

Carl nodded softly. He has dropped by once a week since Sandrine’s death, always, as now, with a hot meal from his restaurant: spaghetti, manicotti, eggplant rollatini. We have been neighbors for eleven years. His life has been seasoned by misfortune. Along with his own poor health he has known widowhood, and his son, now fourteen, has never been well. We’ve borrowed tools from each other and from time to time had short conversations about nothing I could later recall, but it was the night I’d quite by accident saved his son’s life that had turned acquaintance into friendship, at least in Carl’s mind.

On that particular night, he had suddenly gotten the idea that he’d left one of the restaurant ovens on and had rushed to his car. He was barreling toward the street when I noticed his son, Anthony, facedown in the driveway. He’d had one of his seizures, and at that instant it was clear to me that he lay directly in the path of Carl’s car. As anyone else would have done, I bolted for Anthony, swooped him up, and dove, with the boy in my arms, into the safety of the adjoining yard just in time to miss the right rear bumper of Carl’s Saturn. We were still on the ground when Carl rushed over to us. He leaped from the car without first putting it in gear so that it had continued on down the driveway and rammed into the brick mailbox at the end of it. Carl had seen none of this, however. He was focused on Anthony. We both immediately dashed over to my car and rushed him to the local hospital, where he’d quickly recovered.

Anyone would have done what I did but Carl thought it heroic, and from that moment on he pledged to be my friend eternally. Since Sandrine’s death, with his visits and his gifts of steaming Italian food, he has proven to be just that.

“I put in some garlic bread,” he said.

“Thank you, Carl.”

“Enjoy,” he said as he pressed the bag toward me.

He had always been deeply inarticulate, and the trouble I was in had only made him more so. Even under normal circumstances he would have had little to say. Now every word seemed the product of a long travail.

Carl eased away from me as if to the sound of a ticking bomb.

“Well, good night, Sam.”

“Good night, Carl.”

He seemed to dissolve almost instantly, leaving me alone and staring at the bag of food he’d brought me.

Normally I’d at least have a taste of that garlic bread, but at that moment I had no appetite for anything. In fact, encased within the bleakness of this occasion, I wondered if I’d ever have a taste for anything again. Whatever the food, it would remind me of Sandrine. If it were Middle Eastern I’d think of our few days in Istanbul. If it were French I’d think of her in Paris. If it were Italian I’d think of strolling the streets of Rome with her or swimming with her in Capri. Or would I think of Venice, drifting beneath the Bridge of Sighs, that storied kiss. Some years later, I’d asked her quite seriously if she thought that moment would perhaps be that the one she would most remember about our Mediterranean trip. Her answer had been swift and sure. No, she’d said, her gaze very soft and loving, that will be Albi.

Albi, I thought now, where that candle had come from. Albi, the page she dogeared in the travel book she’d taken to her bed on that last night.

“You really should try to get some sleep, Dad.”

I turned to find Alexandria standing a few feet away, backlit and motionless, a figure that struck me quite suddenly as rather sinister, a woman in the house who was not Sandrine. My daughter, yes, as I realized quite achingly, but even so a woman I did not actually know.

“A long day tomorrow, remember?” she added.

“I remember,” I said quietly. “Okay, I’ll go to bed very soon. You should get some sleep yourself.”

She nodded, turned, then disappeared in the same ghostly way as Carl had vanished moments before.

I put the food Carl had brought me in the refrigerator, then washed, brushed my teeth, went to the toilet, and finally, with no alternative, crawled into bed.

It was late but I couldn’t get to sleep. Alexandria was right. Tomorrow would be a long day. I had seen the witness list and so I knew that as of tomorrow the case against me would build steadily and grow more sinister.

I grabbed the remote and turned on the television.

On the screen, a beautiful young actress was talking to a middle-aged late-night host about her new movie. In the film she played a comic book character rather than a person.

“Is it easier to be a comic book character than a human being?” the host asked her in the slightly mischievous bad-boy way of late night hosts.

Surprisingly, the young actress appeared somewhat troubled by the question. A hint of gravity appeared in her eyes, as if she’d glimpsed the looming approach of a force bent on killing her.

“Safer,” she said.

Well, that much is true, I thought, then glanced over to the bureau where Sandrine had kept her scarves and blouses along with the faded jeans and floppy sweatshirts she’d often worn around the house. Beautiful women are even more beautiful, as Willa Cather once observed, in a state of dishabille. This had certainly been true of Sandrine, a fact made entirely evident by the photo that rested in a little chrome frame on top of this same bureau, and which showed her sitting on the steps of the Coburn College library.

I was still drifting in the remembered beauty of those early days when Alexandria tapped at my door.

“It’s one-thirty, Dad,” she informed me. “You really should go to bed.”

“Sleep is for the dull,” I said, knowing quite well that there would be little sleep for me that night.

“Whatever,” Alexandria muttered.

The bedroom door was closed but I could hear her step away and move on down the corridor to her room. I couldn’t see the expression on her face, of course, but I knew it was sour. She had previously made it clear that I was one of those people who always had an answer, and I had to admit that for most of my life I had, in fact, always had one. But since my trial it seems that I’d had only questions for which I can find no answers, though I continued to feel that they were there waiting for me, these answers, and that I would eventually find them. In one of Sandrine’s unpublished essays, she wrote that there should be no distinction between questions for the head and questions for the heart because no compelling answer could be offered to either without giving voice to both.

Sociopath.

Her voice sounded so clearly in my mind at that moment that I actually spun around, as if expecting to see her standing before me as she had that night, her eyes aflame as she’d reached for that white cup.

Sociopath.

Perhaps she’d been right, I told myself, as I twisted around and turned off the light. Perhaps I am even now strangely disconnected to the very events that are most critical to my life, and thus increasingly hard-pressed to defend myself against the many charges made against me. The only thing about Catholicism that ever made sense to Sandrine was the confessional, and in this she was right. More, perhaps even more than someone to love and love us back, we need someone to whom we can tell the unvarnished truth about ourselves. That is what I found myself missing most at that moment as I stared into the darkness. What I missed more than ever, and would forever miss, was simply and irreducibly Sandrine, her heartbreaking truths, the way she’d released the last of them like an arrow into darkness.

You are nothing, Sam. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Her last words to me.