2008
All night long June is disturbed by thoughts of lying in court. When finally she falls asleep she dreams about being in the courtroom again, speaking into the stemmed microphone from her place at the witness stand with its blond wood and uncomfortable chair. In the dream she tells unimaginable tales to the judge: that Bobbie had tried to kill her, that Bobbie had tried to kill Craig. All the while, the judge stares down at her until eventually June stops talking. The courtroom is silent in the dream and the judge’s face begins to distort, narrowing and expanding as though she is chewing with large, inhuman jaws. The judge rises from her seat, her body formless, swimming in all her black robes, and declares June a liar. Staring into the judge’s giant face with its grinding jaws, she is at once terrified and mesmerized. You’re a liar! shouts the judge, until at last June is awake again.
The sky is starless, the birds not yet in song. She can hear her heart thumping in the still, black room. Even her fingers are quivering. Dreyer will put her back on the witness stand this morning. He has a fast mind. She is no match for him. If he believes she was lying about having seen Bobbie that night, he will take her by the neck as a fox will a chicken.
Not even Elstree had been nice. She’d scolded June for stating she’d seen Bobbie the night of the crash, warning her that if it wasn’t true she had most certainly broken the law.
She then spent some time coaching June on what to do next.
“Don’t add a single new detail,” Elstree told her. “Don’t admit to anything more than it was your habit to check your daughter. Do you understand? Make it sound like a routine thing, and that you can’t remember much. Answer yes or no. This is not difficult.” She had seemed so exasperated with June. She’d all but rolled her eyes at her.
“I’m sorry,” June had kept repeating, though she didn’t know what she was sorry for exactly. By stating that she’d seen Bobbie that night, she had made it less likely anyone would believe that Bobbie had been in the car. Why was that wrong?
“The less you say the better,” Elstree said. The painted commas of her lashless eyes knit together. “Don’t go off script during a cross-examination. You have to stay consistent. I thought we’d agreed on that.”
“I didn’t mean to make things worse,” she’d pleaded.
Now all June wishes for is that she would fall back to sleep. Perhaps she should have a glass of wine. Soon the birds will begin singing and light will flood the room and she’ll have missed all opportunity for rest. A glass or two would do it. On the wall behind her dresser are photographs of Bobbie as a little girl. On the night table is a photograph of her and Craig after they were married. She cannot see these things now, but she knows they are there, knows every inch and every detail. She remembers the cross-examination with a similar focus. She tells herself her testimony wasn’t exactly a lie. She hadn’t really lied on the stand because had she arrived back that night after the hospital and checked, she would certainly have found Bobbie in her bed sleeping. She was sure of this, just as she was sure of the faces she’d memorized in the photographs on her dresser.
She switches on a light. Craig’s side of the bed is unoccupied, as usual. These days he sleeps on the couch in the living room or sometimes in what had been Bobbie’s room. She knows if she goes downstairs she’ll find him there, his bong on the coffee table along with the TV Guide and all the spent ash from smoking. He always leaves food out—pizza crusts stacked like ribs, Doritos bags crushed into balls on the floor, cereal boxes with their tops open from where he’s taken handfuls from the box. It isn’t unusual for him to bring out a pint of ice cream and let it melt over the glass table.
If she were to walk downstairs now, if she were to go to him and tell him she’s had a bad dream and ask him to come to bed with her, he would growl like a dog. Actually sit there growling. Then he would say, “That’s a negative.” And nothing, absolutely nothing else, until she left him alone again.
She knows, too, that if she were to bring a quilt with her and curl up in the armchair beside him, he’d eventually wake and say “Why’re you here?,” as though she had no right to be in her own living room and there was no value in being close when sleeping.
She goes into the hall. The lights are still on downstairs and she can hear Craig snoring. When he first started sleeping in another room, his snoring was his excuse. He said he didn’t want to disturb her. He used to summon her for sex every once in a while. In her chest of drawers are all the red and black negligees, satiny gowns, strappy slips with plunging necklines, none of which she has use for anymore.
She turns on the faucet and sits heavily on the closed toilet seat, squinting into the darkness. She feels the pulse of a headache in the very center of her brow, the weight of her heavy eyelids. She does not turn on any lights. She is aware of the solid band of extra fat around her middle, and yesterday’s hair spray making her hair stick out in tufts from her head. The same thought that comes to her every so often springs into her mind once again: She is too old for him. She could never get her body to his liking. For all the dieting and reducing and cinching in of clothes and belts, the effect was never what she’d hoped for. Her skin has stretched out, the texture rippled with stretch marks. Her breasts face down like two dead fish. What she wishes for most, if it were possible to have, is a man who accepts that a woman—that she—will age. A man who accepts that they will both grow old, and for whom she would forgive his own bulging belly or vanished hairline, and from whom she would receive the same measure of grace.
She takes a bath in the dark. It is more pleasant than she would have thought. The water in darkness feels new, as though it could have come from somewhere natural—a river, the ocean. In the dark water, in the veil of quiet, she is able to feel peace.
In her life she has often wished there were someone who could lean over her and tell her what to do next. Do this, now do this. A little direction, a little guidance. It occurs to her that there is no “other life” she can create from here. If Craig leaves her or, God forbid, goes to jail, there will be no future to which she can look forward. No attractive direction her life could take. No other, different man. Her life, with all its turns and road signs, has led to this one single point.
Last night, after Craig had fallen asleep on the sofa, she brought a blanket to drape over him. He woke long enough to say, “You did good.”
“I lied,” was all that she could manage.
“She’s the one lying,” he said.
June had looked away from Craig, up through the living-room curtains he hadn’t bothered to draw, and saw the black silhouettes of trees and a tooth of moon in the sky. She remembered when Bobbie would chase fireflies and make mud cakes and search the window wells for toads, digging gently into the sandy soil where the toads buried themselves to keep cool.
“I will never understand why it has to be like this,” she said. She wanted Craig to hug her, but he did not move. “Other families don’t have such troubles.”
“Here we go again,” he said. “It’s the witching hour.”
There was an abiding absence in her life that she felt more acutely at night and that, however she tried, she could not entirely suppress. But right then, she was not thinking so much about Bobbie’s absence as her return, and the fact that she now found herself opposed to Bobbie in a courtroom, of all places, when what she really wanted was for her daughter to visit her like any other daughter might. To be with her, to be part of her.
She had wanted Craig to reach for her or at least open his eyes. The lid of his artificial eye was not able to close naturally like his good eye, and the appearance of an iris made it seem as though he were looking at her when she knew he was not. After a moment, he said, “I’m trying to get a few z’s before the hanging. So if you are going to fret about the person tightening the noose, go somewhere else.”
She wished he wouldn’t speak like that. “That person is my daughter. And they aren’t going to hang you,” she said.
He yawned. “From the highest tree.”
“I don’t want to go back in the morning,” she told him.
“You have to go. That’s the law. And if you don’t tell it right they’ll believe her.”
“I feel like I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” he said, purposefully. “They’re going to put me in jail if you don’t go. If you don’t tell them exactly like you did yesterday.”
“But there really isn’t any proof—”
“You’re going.”
AND THAT WAS how it was. This morning, after her bath, he comes upstairs. He watches as she gets dressed, uses perfume, dabs on concealer, then enough foundation to cover the dark circles under her eyes.
“Do a good job,” he says, bringing her a hairbrush.
IN COURT, JUNE cannot decline the Bible that is brought to her by the statuesque black bailiff with his high, dense shoulders and giant hands. She puts her palm across its leather skin and swears to tell the truth. She feels a spreading panic inside her and is desperate not to let this show. She wants the fire alarm to sound, or the lights to go out, or the judge to bang her gavel and dismiss court for any reason at all. Instead Dreyer stands near her with his sheaf of papers while the judge, in her lofty seat, removes her tortoiseshell eyeglasses, polishing them against the sleeve of her robe. The judge has long, well-manicured fingernails that cause her to grip her pen in a peculiar manner. She manages to look both bored and grave at the same time while Dreyer paces four steps one way, then back again, asking questions that clarify some of June’s answers of the previous day. She knows Dreyer is just warming up, establishing a relationship with the jury before taking the questions further, deeper. It’s like he is opening a wound with a penknife—little stab, little stab—until he is tearing through skin, then muscle, then bone.
Her throat is dry, her lips tight around her teeth. The room is airless and silent except for Dreyer’s questions. June looks over and sees Bobbie behind Dreyer’s empty chair. She feels drawn to her, yet oddly afraid, too. Afraid of her own daughter. She tries to discern how Bobbie is feeling from the expression on her face, but the girl is now a woman who is skilled at hiding her feelings. Sitting next to Craig at the defense table is Elstree. Elstree’s full attention is on the witness stand, and she reminds June of a horse—head high, ears pricked, glossy eyes, staring unblinking in anticipation of near danger.
“Do you remember if it was dark outside or light when you returned from the hospital?” Dreyer is asking.
She does not remember, no. It was so long ago.
“Do you remember if there were lights on in the house or none?”
No, she does not remember.
Dreyer paces, fires a question, paces some more, asks another question. June despairs. How can she continue to answer with nothing other than I don’t remember? How can she keep this up for minutes, then for hours? She hopes Elstree can see how difficult her job on the stand is. As the questions fly at her, she wants to call out for help—How do I answer? Now this one, now this? She wonders why Elstree just sits there without objecting while Dreyer continues with his bullying.
“Can you remember what time it was when you came home from the hospital?” he asks.
She does not know. “Can I have water?” she says.
“It’s just here,” Dreyer says.
“Where?”
“In front of you.”
She can feel drops of perspiration rolling on her skin. She cannot stop herself looking over at Bobbie. She is thirsty. The courtroom waits as she drinks. Finally she puts the cup down, staring out at the giant American bald eagle emblazoned on the wall ahead of her, with its stiff, menacing wings, its eyes that focus outward as though searching the sky for a place to conduct its wrath.
“Do you need me to repeat the question?” Dreyer’s voice.
“I don’t remember,” she says.
The judge shifts out of her boredom and eyes June carefully, then shoots a look at Dreyer.
He says, “Perhaps you need me to repeat the question. Are you aware that your daughter has stated under oath that she was in Mr. Kirtz’s car the night of the accident on September seventh?” he says.
June nods. “I heard her,” she says. And then, because she knows she has to answer yes or no, she adds, “Yes.”
Five minutes more, ten minutes more. She wonders how much longer they can go on. It infuriates her, how the questions keep coming.
“Is there anything you can remember, Mrs. Kirtz, that would suggest Bobbie had been in that accident?”
“Anything I can suggest?” She feels almost as though she will begin to cry with frustration. She is supposed to suggest Bobbie had been in the car? But then it becomes at once very clear to her: Dreyer has nothing more to say. She sits with this knowledge for a moment before speaking. “No,” she says.
Dreyer nods to himself. He has run out of things to ask. He stands awkwardly, looking at June as though he can’t quite believe it, either. There was no further argument, no proof, no clever questions to corner her into a confession. He is done.
June glances at Elstree, who is looking straight toward her, her lips parted as though to speak. Elstree had been right all along. No wonder she’d been so tough in her coaching. She had understood that June need do nothing more than refuse to add to the cross-examination that had taken place yesterday. June’s testimony disproves the case against Craig. Bobbie was at home in bed. An eyewitness—her own mother—swears this is the case.
She smiles. She cannot help herself. She almost laughs out loud. How can anyone prove her wrong? She hopes Elstree can see what is happening here, how she has held her own against Dreyer, how she has won.
“Did you notice any unusual behavior from your daughter in the days following September seventh?” Dreyer continues.
“She was fine.” This is easy. Just keep saying the same thing over and over.
“Allow me to finish. Inability to sleep, to concentrate, frequent headaches, withdrawal? Any signs of such behavior in your daughter?”
She could see that Elstree was about to object. Possibly, she was going to alert the judge to the way Dreyer was repeating himself.
“Bobbie was her usual self. Just a normal girl,” June says.
“Anything that your daughter may have said to you during the days after the crash? Or perhaps a comment made by another person?”
June is about to inform Dreyer that there was nothing at all to suggest her daughter had been involved in that collision—no injuries or soiled clothes or signs of trauma—when all at once she remembers something. It is a moment she’d forgotten, or thought she’d forgotten, but that must have stayed hidden inside her for all this time, revealing itself only now.
What she remembers, almost as though it is happening before her, is the night in the hospital when Craig had finally gained enough strength to talk, those first words when he was able to speak. She’d bent her head low to his mouth and heard the croaky whisper after all those days of silence, the very first question on his lips. What happened to Barbara? he’d said. Is Barbara okay?
The memory alarms her; she is spooked. There on the witness stand, the focal point of everyone in the court, she feels suddenly afraid of what she knows, what she has known all along.
“Oh, oh no—” she begins, then stops herself.
“Mrs. Kirtz?” It is Dreyer.
She looks at his face, his handsome menacing young face, his gray-blue eyes, his rosy complexion, and her gaze goes straight through him to where her husband sits in the courtroom, where Craig sits. She wishes she could go to him now and ask him why he’d woken that day, that very first day, and asked about Bobbie, who he had no reason to ask after, who he’d not seen for months as far as June had been aware, and who had not been in the car. She remembers not only that his first words were about Bobbie but also his tone. It hadn’t struck her because she had not been familiar with his manner of speaking back then, had not learned yet how to read him. But that night at the hospital when he asked what happened to Bobbie he had sounded conscience-stricken, even afraid. She’d thought it was just the pain he was in, the fear of his own injuries, but it was more than that. She understood this now. He thought he’d killed her daughter.
“If you don’t mind answering the question,” Dreyer says. She nods, but doesn’t speak. Dreyer continues, “Did your daughter or another person say anything that might suggest that Bobbie had been in the car on the seventh of September?”
Her mouth is dry. Her tongue won’t work. It’s like she has to spit out a whole nest of spiders before, finally, wrenching out “No.”
“Your daughter has stated that she had a bruise across the bridge of her nose. Also, that there were many other scratches. Most of the lacerations were able to be concealed, but the one on her face? Do you recall such a thing? A bruise on your daughter’s face? I can have the testimony read back to you if that helps.”
“No,” June says, a little too quickly for it to sound as though she is really giving the question the attention that Dreyer is asking for.
“You are swearing you saw no bruises or cuts or any signs of injury on your child immediately following the night of September seventh?” Dreyer says.
“Yes, I am swearing that,” June says. “Nobody could have walked away from that crash.”
“Don’t concern yourself with the accident right now, Mrs. Kirtz, but just cast your mind back to that time and whether there were any signs of injury—”
“I said there was nothing!” June declares sharply. But everything about her manner suggests she is unsure. She clears her throat, trying to regain some of the bravado she’d felt earlier. Lodged in her thoughts now are the pestering memories of Craig asking after Bobbie when he first woke. It keeps playing out in her head, how he croaked out the words What happened to Barbara? Why would he ask that? The memory has unlocked yet another memory and in her mind now she sees Bobbie as a teenager, with her spaghetti arms and large, clear eyes. She’s standing in a doorway wearing khaki summer pants that tie at the ankles, striped socks, and a turtleneck. Why is she wearing a turtleneck in the heat? Why is she wearing a hat? June recalls, too, a bruise blooming across the bridge of her nose. She’d asked Bobbie about it and been told it happened at school during PE.
“I don’t remember,” June says. She glances at Bobbie. She is an elegant woman in her forties, with a slim musculature that she must have inherited from her father. Her blond hair is honey-colored, piled onto her head rather than draping the length of her back as it once had. Even so, June can see the little girl in her grown daughter. And, too, she can still picture her standing in the doorway in the crazy clothes that were all wrong for the heat wave they’d endured.
Without even drawing a conclusion, June realizes that Bobbie had tried to protect her from knowing. That she had covered herself, hidden any signs of injury, waited for weeks to pass, never allowing her mother to see. This thought, above all others, is what grips June most. For decades she has imagined herself as a victim of Bobbie’s capriciousness, of her misadventure, running away as she had. But now, in an instant, she understands this was not the case, had never been the case. Bobbie had done everything she could to shield her.
The moment seizes June, fixing her in the chair. She searches Bobbie’s face and wants so much to communicate her new knowledge. You were there, she admits silently to her daughter. You were in that car.
Now the judge is speaking, but June cannot take in what is being said. Her mind is filled with the thought of her child in that smoking carcass of a car with its crumpled body. It is everything she can do to keep herself still and not run to Bobbie. She cannot hear Dreyer when he responds to the judge, cannot think of anything except Bobbie, who glares at her, who seems to hate her. It is as though all the sound has gone off in the room and she is alone, staring at her daughter whom she has called a liar and whom she lost through her own ignorance, lost long ago.
“Are you going to ask this witness a question?” the judge says to Dreyer.
“No further questions,” Dreyer says.
She is free to leave the stand. She can go, but she does not move. She thinks, instead, of how she’d tackled all of Dreyer’s questions and had still come out wrong. So wrong, she cannot cope. Cannot. She feels light-headed; she feels weak. She leans to the left and rests her shoulder on the arm of the chair. So this is what fainting feels like, she thinks, like a sudden sleep that comes over you. The room is darkening. Her eyes close. She wonders when she will wake up, and where, and just as she has that thought she realizes that she isn’t going to faint after all. She is sweating, and her heart flutters and flips, but she is only having another panic attack. There is nothing wrong with her except the simple understanding that her daughter has been telling the truth and, even worse, that she had tried to do so in years past.