History of Wolves(63)

“What a doozy of a day!” I heard, as my mom and I filed up the marble stairs to the courthouse.

“What a perfect ten!” was the reply—though it was ninety degrees already.

Inside, I had to listen to the same conversation about the weather again and again. I watched the DA’s assistant flick a finger in a glass of water and dampen her lips as she spoke to a man who was painstakingly rolling up one of his sleeves, inch-by-inch-by-inch. I watched them eyeing me in my thrift-store dress—assessing me, and at the same time pretending they weren’t. When I glared back, they pinched their eyes into smiles, looked at their watches, crossed their legs. Beside me, my mom sat too close on the gallery bench, sweating and fanning herself with one limp hand. My dad had decided not to come. He’d said he was afraid that a shift in the wind would bring the fires closer, and though I’d hoped for more from him I knew better than to question this or ask him to reconsider. Someone shoved open a window at the back of the courtroom and a breeze trickled in, but it wasn’t enough. At one point, my mom put her damp hand on my arm.

“Oh my, oh my,” she said, so I followed her gaze.

Leo and Patra came in, single file. Patra’s hair had grown out, I saw as they walked past. It no longer frizzed up around her ears, but hung gelled with product over her sweatered shoulders. She was wearing a baby-blue cardigan, and already, even before she got on the stand, navy crescents of sweat bloomed under each armpit.

I expected her to look over at me and give me a sign. A wave across the stuffy courtroom, a hello or a nod. Or, if she couldn’t manage that, I thought I could understand. I’d take a glance in my direction, any indication at all that she saw me. But every time I looked her way, her eyes went somewhere else. She was whispering something in Leo’s ear or examining the bracelet on her wrist. She took a sip of water from a bottle on the table where she sat. One knee jiggled under her black silk skirt, but her face was as calm as I’d ever seen it.

On the stand she kept her eyes down most of the time, her hands folded in her lap. When her lawyer asked about her childhood she answered in paragraphs. Back straight. She responded to the district attorney’s questions when he addressed her with such precision—such mildness—that she might have been discussing weather, too, but with a touch more regret than everyone else in the room, perhaps even condescension. That’s what the DA wanted the jury to resent her for most, I understood from my pretrial prep, her blitheness and her youth, her professor husband. He implied that these things made Patra the worst combination of snobbish and debased. “Speak up!” the DA said once when she folded a tissue to blow her nose, and she replied—with what might have been fear, but also might have been contempt—”I did not say anything.”

It went on like that. The DA asking her to clarify or speak up, and Patra repeating herself in a small, breathy voice. She never once said my name, or Paul’s. She said “the babysitter.” She said “my son, whom I love.” As she murmured her mild answers, I thought I could imagine the schoolteacher Patra might have been, the editor in her checking every word with her neat red pen. I could hear the grammar in her sentences. I could hear all her minute corrections. My son who, whom I love so much, told me he was feeling better. I was We were relieved overjoyed. We couldn’t could not have been happier. She sat up straighter and straighter as she spoke, and her neck seemed longer. In a short time, the blue fabric under her arms was nearly black.

“I’m trying to understand, Mrs. Gardner. I am.” The DA put his hand to his chest so that his tie squished up a little under his chin. “You’re saying you didn’t see that something was wrong? Or that you did, and failed to seek treatment? It can only be one or the other. Please help us understand.”

I watched Patra swallow. “He was being—treated.”

“Yes, fine, your husband explained yesterday. We’re all for prayer. We’re not here to put anyone’s religion on trial. But I need you to clarify something for us. The morning you were in Duluth, that is, the morning of June twentieth, didn’t you tell your husband you were taking Paul to the store for—what was it—picnic supplies? When in fact you placed a call to the pediatrician you’d contacted months before, Dr.—”

The quickest of glances at Leo. “No one was there.”

“But you thought something was wrong? You understood at that point something was wrong.”

A swallow, the whole mechanism of her throat moving. “There was never a—diagnosis.”

“Why was that?”

“People go to doctors all the time.” For the first time all day I could hear the pleading in her voice. I could hear how much she wanted to convince him of this, or at least make him be nicer to her. She put her white hands on the railing in front of her. “Don’t people go to doctors all the time? And they don’t always get better?”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Gardner, you’re changing the subject. Please don’t make me remind you, again, to answer the question that’s been asked. We’ve already heard that insulin and fluids might have saved him up to two hours before he suffered cardiac arrest. Two hours. The treatment is minimal and simple—”

“I’m his mother—” Patra interrupted.

“You were his mother,” the DA interrupted back.

Something rushed into her face, then flowed out again like water. All the muscles in her face clenched—then let go. After that she waited patiently for the next question, eyes flat as two tiny blue screens. She repeated the same things she’d said before: He was fine. He was resting in bed. And when the DA dismissed her at last, frustrated, she moved across the courtroom with her TV eyes, holding her bottle of water upside down in both hands like a throttle.