FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE HIS TRIAL STARTED, JOHN STUDIED the forewoman of the jury. She wore a floral-patterned blouse and glasses that framed half her face. Her permed brown hair was teased up in the front, her lipstick fresh and glossy. John suspected she had reapplied before the jury entered the courtroom. This was the jury’s moment—hers by proxy. Maybe nobody had looked at her this closely in years. She clenched the verdict form—thirty minutes prior, an incomplete form on a plain sheet of paper—like a talisman.
Given the past year, John thought that he would be used to waiting, being a spectator floating in his own shoes, watching a doppelgänger walk through his life. But he still reached out to touch the table in front of him to confirm that he was in fact inside of his body. As a child, he once lay in a drift in a park after a winter storm, hood up over his head, and the weightlessness, the whisper of his breath, the icy tickle of snow landing on his face, and the echo of his thudding heart pressed him so deep inside of his body that his mind stilled, and he looked at the bare branches of the trees above him with the knowledge that this was what dying was like—not an abandonment of his body, but a retreat into the hollows within it. He wanted to return to that moment, to stop staring at the forewoman, waiting for her to answer the judge’s question: “Does the jury have a verdict?”
The ritual required the question. Nobody would be in the courtroom at that moment unless the jury had reached a verdict in The People of the State of New York v. Chong Lo, but it had to be asked and answered. The forewoman was taking entirely too long to answer it. Although John understood that only a second or two passed, his mind accelerated to a near-incomprehensible speed. John worried again that he was no longer tethered to his body and instead, some pilot occupied it, leading it down tightening corridors until he was here, wedged into a chasm waiting for the final slip.
The forewoman finally spoke. “Yes, Your Honor.” Her voice was slightly raspy, but the words were clear.
The jury had deliberated for two days. John’s lawyer, Harris Isaacs, thought that the long deliberation was a good sign. The verdict had to be unanimous. Maybe a holdout or two for acquittal was delaying a guilty verdict. A hung jury was essentially a win for the defense; it wasn’t a conviction. But Harris also allowed himself to dream that the holdout was on the other side—a lone juror who wanted to convict—and that the others were arguing for reasonable doubt. He didn’t mention that dream to John, but John saw Harris’s hope in the way he paced the conference room where they waited for word from the jury, the way he spoke to the paralegal, even in the way he doodled on his legal pad. It was Harris’s first murder trial.
John heard his wife take a breath behind him, anticipating the next words in the colloquy. Jane had sat through the entire trial, every day, behind him in the gallery, even though he had been sleeping on the couch for months. John wondered if she’d be there but for the kids. Her mind was closed to him; he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. He could smell her perfume, faintly, lingering around his clothes or in his hair or maybe his memory. She hugged him before he went in for the verdict—their first physical contact since the day the cops came to take him in for questioning.
#
John thought it would be a day or two before the cops came for him, but as it turned out, the detectives knocked on his apartment door right after he got home from work. Jane chased the children around while still wearing her stockings and work clothes, high heels lying in the middle of the living room floor. As John slid out into the hall to speak to the detectives, Jane looked up from tickling Hunter—no concern, merely curiosity. Brennan was trying to push her mom over to save her little brother, to no avail.
The jowly detective, Bauman, said, “You left some things out when you spoke to us at your office this afternoon.”
John said nothing. He knew that most white people had trouble discerning what he was thinking. But the younger detective, McCann, wasn’t even looking at him. He stared over John’s head at the apartment door. “You want to come down to the station and answer our questions there? Or here with your wife and kids?”
“Let me get my jacket.”
John left the cops in the hall. Jane still wrestled with the kids on the floor. She regarded him with a glance, then turned back to her children.
“The police have some questions about Jessica. They think I can help.”
Jane had a giggling Brennan pinned with one hand. “I thought they spoke to everyone at the office.”
“Yeah, but you know how they are. They want to go back over some things. Less disruptive now than earlier at the office.”
“Okay. But why don’t you just talk to them here? I can make coffee.”
“No. We’ll have to get the kids to bed soon.”
She let Brennan up and absently held a hand up to stop Hunter from diving on top of her.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” John walked over and kissed the kids. “It should take an hour or two.”
“Okay.”
“Can you call Harris, though? Ask him to meet me at the Twenty-Fourth Precinct.”
“Why do you need Harris?”
“Jane, you know that the main things we learned in law school were not to represent ourselves and not to talk to the cops without a lawyer. Can you please just call him?”
She nodded, but her eyes fixed on his. She held herself still—like a doe in the woods.
When John returned from the precinct four hours later, the children were asleep. Jane sat at the kitchen table, still in her work clothes, smoking a pack of cigarettes with a scotch in hand. She jumped up and hugged him, nearly burning him with her cigarette, then hit him with two palms to the chest, heedless of the flakes of ash drifting to the floor.
“What the fuck, John?”
“Sit down,” he said as he walked to the cabinet to get a glass. He hoped he wouldn’t drop it as he poured the scotch to the brim.
“What did they want? Why did they need to take you to the precinct?”
He sat down across the table from her. He usually didn’t smoke, but he took a cigarette from the pack. His hand shook as he lit it. He focused on the matches so he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes.
“Are the kids asleep?”
“You know they’re asleep. John,” she said. Then, a command: “Tell me.”
Despite the imperative, there was vulnerability in her eyes again, something he hadn’t seen in years. He knew it was the last time he would see it.
“I had an affair,” he said.
She stood up and strode out of the room, leaving him at the table, wreathed in smoke.
#
In the courtroom, Jane sat behind John as he stood, and the judge said, “On the sole charge of the indictment, murder in the second degree, how does the jury find?”
John questioned whether it even mattered. The cops believed that he was guilty. So did Jessica’s family. They said so, as often as possible, to the New York Post and the Daily News and ABC Eyewitness News and to anyone who would listen. The reporters thought he was guilty. The headlines had been unrestrained. “Devil” was one New York Post headline, laid over a picture of his face like an old propaganda poster from World War II. The jury couldn’t change any of that. They couldn’t find him “innocent.” The best they could do was “not guilty.” John didn’t know if Jane thought him guilty, but he supposed that she wouldn’t let him live in their apartment with the kids if she believed he was a murderer in addition to an adulterer.
The kids. No matter how the jury voted, his children were lost to him. They would never look at him again the way children should look at a father at their age. At any age.
The forewoman stared at the verdict form, like she had forgotten the unanimous decision that she and eleven other jurors reached less than an hour prior.
#
Two days after the cops came to the house, when John realized the stories were going to run in the papers and that he was eventually going to be arrested for Jessica’s murder, he took out a blank sheet of paper—there were no forms for the words he had to write.
The home office was a mess. The cops executed their search warrant right after the kids left for school. The doorman called John at the office, John called Harris, and the two of them rushed to the apartment to watch Bauman, McCann, and some patrolmen ransack it. The cops took very little—all of John’s shoes, some clothes, a couple of kitchen knives, a note from Jessica they found in a desk drawer. They didn’t pick up after themselves, but they were gentler with the kids’ room. They marched their plunder past the tabloid photographers and reporters they had tipped to the warrant execution, who were disappointed that it hadn’t ended with a perp walk.
John understood that he was going to be led out in cuffs eventually. But the first humiliation was going to be the stories in the newspapers the next morning. John knew the formula as well as any other New Yorker. The papers would report the search of his apartment, and unnamed sources would indicate that he and the victim had been having an affair. The second humiliation would be dealing with the firm. As a partner, he couldn’t simply be fired. If he were a white rainmaker, they might negotiate a leave of absence or sabbatical until more information was available. As the only Asian American partner with a middling book of business, he was certain he faced whatever the process was to terminate his partnership.
John sat in the ruins of his home, peering at the future degradations—the neighbors staring at his wife and kids, the co-op board trying to force his family out, close friends suddenly lacking time for cocktails or dinners, and his children learning secondhand about parties that they used to be invited to. All of that would occur before—regardless of—any verdict.
The decision to kill himself was one way the formula played out. The kids were young—seven and five. If he went to trial, they’d be another year or two older when it finished—old enough to hear the ugly things about him and fear the outcome of the trial. If John did it soon, with the right kind of note, maybe it would spare his family some of the pain that his living would cause. They could slip away forgotten, extras in a made-for-TV movie. If he could explain things to Jane and his children, maybe they could eventually lead normal lives and not think that he was a monster.
John scribbled out a suicide note trying to explain things, but nothing in it seemed like the truth. It was worse than saying nothing. He burned the letter in his sink, then went back, took another sheet of paper, and wrote out what he would tell the children. He had to organize his thoughts or they would collapse upon each other until the weight of them stifled him, and then all his kids would see was his impassive face and all the love he had for them would be lost inside him—because who had the words for what he had to say? But writing his script, he knew he’d never have the courage to face them or the wisdom to utter words to them that would make any kind of difference in the world they would grow up in because of him. So he burned that paper, too, and took another sheet and started a letter to the woman and man he hoped his daughter and son would become, but that thought was beyond him. What kind of people could they become after what they were going to face? He wrote nothing on that sheet of paper. John stared at it until he heard the nanny bring the kids in from school.
Even tired and whining for a snack, they were perfect. He would never tell them that; who praised children for simply existing? Sometimes, when the children slept and John went in to kiss them goodnight, he stared at the flawless skin of their cheeks, their earnest dream faces, their utter quiet, and wondered how he could have made anything so perfect—much less two of them. But they were there, tangible evidence that he had done something good in this world. That Jane had loved him once. On these nights, John had to restrain himself from scooping them in his arms, settling instead for the briefest brush of his lips across their foreheads.
The nanny went to the kitchen to make them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The children threw their backpacks on the living room floor and grabbed some G.I. Joe figures from the table, beginning some game only they understood. They shouted rules at each other without regard for consistency or logic. John sat down in one of the two chairs by a reading lamp, purchased when he and Jane thought that they would have time to sit by the lamp near the window and spend weekends reading books and sipping coffee, then scotch, then fooling around on the carpet. John couldn’t remember the last time he sat in his chair. Jane’s was piled high with books and clothes the kids had outgrown.
“Kids,” John said. They ignored him. He spoke again. “Brennan, Hunter, come here.”
Naming the kids had been surprisingly easy. The names came from Jane’s family. John saw no point in giving the children Chinese names. He had abandoned his early. His parents were gone and would have wanted white names for the children anyway. For the same reason, John didn’t bother trying to teach them the little Teochew he remembered.
The children were unexpectedly compliant. They never paid attention well, but now they walked over to stand in front of him. He still had no idea what to say or where to start.
“Kids,” he said, and the words hung in the air. “You’re too small to understand, but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to say things to you. So I need you to pay attention.”
They were already paying attention; now they were confused.
“Your dad”—he corrected himself—“I. I made a terrible mistake. Your mother is very angry with me.”
“You’re getting divorced?” Brennan asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not. But whatever happens with me and Mommy, things are going to get very bad. We will try to protect you from it, but you’re going to have to grow up a lot faster than you should have to.”
He knew they didn’t understand and regretted not writing something down to help him through the moment.
“People are going to say your father made a mistake and did some bad things.”
“But you don’t make mistakes,” Brennan said.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Hunter interjected. His sister pushed him.
“Stop,” John said, and they fell silent. “He’s right. Everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes they’re big. We take responsibility for our mistakes. Do you understand?”
Both children nodded.
“And one of the bad things that they’re going to say I did, it’s a really bad thing. And we won’t be able to hide it from you. So you’re going to have to be strong. And when you think you can’t be stronger, you’ll have to be, okay? Because you have to be strong for Mommy, too. Do you understand?”
They didn’t, but nodded because they thought that it was the right thing to do, and that was close enough for John. He pulled them close in for a hug, and for once, they didn’t completely squirm away, but stood firm and wrapped him in their strongest embraces.
#
The visceral memory of his children’s embraces brought John back to his body, standing next to Harris and in front of Jane, staring at the forewoman as she said, “Not guilty.”