“One more word from you and I’ll hold you in contempt of court.”
The judge’s words landed like spittle on Rosa’s cheeks. She ached to wipe her face. Instead she sat up straight in the witness stand, willing her hands to stay clenched in her lap. She returned his stare, imagining her own olive skin facing off against his purple complexion. Maybe he would burst a blood vessel. Imagining that worked better than picturing him walking naked down the street, the emperor without clothes—that’s what her lawyer suggested if she felt intimidated by the courtroom ceremony, the robes and office. But she would not be intimidated.
She ignored the judge’s threat and turned to the jury, trying to keep her voice even and reasonable. “It’s not just me on trial here. Our country is on trial. Because our rich and powerful nation, built on principles of freedom, is committing genocide in Southeast Asia.”
The judge banged his gavel.
“I am a citizen.” Rosa did not shout. She kept her gaze on the members of the jury. “I have the right to speak.”
The bailiff smothered her words. His hand was thick and sprouted coarse dark hairs. She tore it away from her face and yelled, “The citizens are against this war. You can lock me up, but you can’t jail dissent!”
Two officers dragged her from the courtroom into a small room. She put her head down on the metal table and bit her lip to keep from sobbing. She needed a clear head to figure this out. It was no big surprise that District Attorney Arnold Turner was prosecuting her case personally. He was running for Congress on a law and order campaign. Convicting her and scoring a stiff sentence would win votes. Allen seemed to think that was a bad omen, but Rosa was elated.
“See, Turner is ambitious, and he sees this case as important. People are watching us,” she argued with Allen and Dwayne at the lunch break. “Our action was small, but it had big consequences. We can make important points here about the war.”
But each day of the trial, the judge looked more sour. Each day DA Turner’s expression grew more confident, his smile wider, his gestures more flamboyant. Her own lawyer seemed to shrink, his sandy hair and pale skin fading into the blond oak of the defense table. He dug the knuckle of his right index finger into the soft flesh near the corner of his mouth, chewing the inside of his cheek.
In their apartment that night, she raged at Allen. “Dwayne is a spineless chicken. Can’t you get Kenny Cockrel, or someone like that?”
“Dwayne is trying to get you off, Rosie,” Allen pleaded. “You’re being unreasonable.”
“You can worry about reason. I care about justice.”
“These charges are serious.” Allen rubbed his hands over his beard, and she thought she saw him roll his eyes, too.
Was even Allen giving up on her? She understood that there was a fine line between standing strong and sounding self-righteous, pompous, even. But sometimes the old slogans were all that kept her going. She let her head rest on his shoulder.
“I know they are,” she whispered. “And I’m scared.”
The charges weren’t the only serious problem. She had missed three periods. She’d been too busy to mark the calendar, so it could have been more. It was probably just all the stress. The trial wasn’t going well and she was the problem. She knew that. Dwayne kept advising her to control her face, to stop interrupting Turner’s theatrical declarations about conspiracies and traitors and giving aid to the enemy. But she couldn’t keep quiet when the DA lied.
At the lunch break on day three, Allen put his hands on Rosa’s shoulders. “This is bad. And the worst testimonies will come tomorrow: the crippled cop’s and Esther’s. So, you’d better decide right now. You can minimize the damage. Or you can make political pronouncements. Your choice.”
Her choice? The jury seemed to have already decided. None of them would meet her eyes. They didn’t seem interested in the plight of Vietnamese peasants, only concerned about one injured police officer. Maybe her best option was skipping out. Leaving town. Disappearing.
She hadn’t decided yet, but she definitely needed more information. She used the public phone in the back hallway to call the number Tim Wright had provided. That evening, Dwayne and Allen worked late at their office preparing for the next day in court. Rosa was supposed to join them. Instead, she changed into a black tee and long black skirt and slipped out of the apartment, climbing through the side window that opened into the narrow alleyway.
Catching the hem of her skirt on the window latch, she lurched forward and scraped her knee on the brick wall. She bit her lower lip to keep from crying out and stood still for a moment in the near darkness, blotting the pinpoints of seeping blood with the cotton skirt. Then she crept quietly around the trash cans at the rear of the apartment complex and through the thick rhododendron bushes into the next street. She was pretty sure the plainclothes cop in the dark green sedan didn’t see her leave.
Her contact was waiting as promised at the back door of the Black Orchid Café. He leaned against the chipped brick wall, long legs in Frye boots. They sat in his rusted Toyota, with The Doors singing loud on the radio, and pretended to neck while he went over the instructions. She hadn’t decided whether to disappear, but she memorized his words.
“You won’t be able to come back here,” he said. “To Michigan. For any reason.”
She stared at the brown birthmark on his cheek, a splash of milky coffee, hoping an onlooker would interpret her disbelief as passion. “Never?”
“Never.”
Her stomach clenched. She took shallow breaths so she wouldn’t vomit. She had to get out of there, into fresh air. “I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
The next morning, Rosa looked around the courtroom and forced herself to face the truth. This trial was a losing game, played entirely by the prosecution’s rules, with all the cards stacked in their favor. Allen was right. It was going to be a bad day: the photographer, the injured cop, and Esther. Her parents sat expressionless in the third row, their shoulders just touching. Esther wasn’t with them. They must be keeping her separate, so she couldn’t listen to the testimony.
Esther hadn’t spoken to her in weeks. It felt like betrayal, but Rosa knew that wasn’t really what Esther meant. Rosa kept thinking back, remembering all their political work together—camp and Ann Arbor and everything. Didn’t Esther feel just as strongly as she did about what they were trying to accomplish? Maybe it was Rosa’s own fault for keeping their cousin Danny’s secret, trying to shield Esther from the truth.
Rosa had never shared Danny’s last letter with anyone: not Esther, not his parents or sister Deborah. Nobody. Written just days before he died, it was smuggled out of Vietnam by a buddy who delivered it in person months later. Rosa could barely recognize Danny in that letter, describing incidents that never made it into the newspapers. How the US soldiers threw wounded Vietnamese women from their helicopters and watched the bodies tumble into the jungle below. How they tossed handfuls of candy from their truck to the village children running alongside, timing it so that the kids were run over by the next vehicle in the convoy.
In the last paragraph, Danny admitted he was hooked on heroin. Danny, who would never even smoke weed, was shooting heroin two or three times a day. Dope was everywhere, he wrote, easier to score than chewing gum, and it made the bad images recede into the jungle. He had gone to the military shrink for help. But there was no methadone. No treatment. No help.
Maybe she should have shared his letter. At the time she told herself she was protecting Esther. Now she wondered if she was protecting herself because of how mean she had been to Danny about going to war.
Elbows planted on the oak table, Rosa rested her head in her hands. When she tried to imagine going away and never coming home, her head spun. The courtroom swelled and vibrated in orange waves. She was queasy all the time now. She pictured Mama and Pop losing their bail money and she almost threw up. She hated deceiving Allen, but her Black Orchid contact warned that if Allen knew her plans he would be an accomplice. He could be charged as an accessory and slapped with a year or two.
Never come back?
Still, it was probably better than waiting around for the inevitable verdict. She looked up as the bailiff’s barbed wire voice called Esther to the stand.