Homeland Elegies(88)

SLAUGHTER



What do you remember about that appointment?



CORINNE



My husband asking him point-blank why he took her off that medication cold turkey. “Why didn’t you taper her off it?” I remember Hal using that word. Taper. It’s what we saw on the internet. You’re never supposed to just stop with the beta-blockers.



SLAUGHTER



Did you tell him that?



CORINNE



I don’t remember what I told him. I’d just buried my second child. I was in no state.



SLAUGHTER



What did he say to your husband?



CORINNE



He didn’t answer. I remember him being pretty nervous.



SLAUGHTER



Can you say more about that?



CORINNE



I remember him coming in and saying he was sorry, saying he’d just gotten in from Milwaukee. But then he looked away from me the whole time. Away from all of us. Looking at the walls, the floor when he talked. He looked guilty to me.



HANNAH



Objection, Your Honor. Inflammatory.



JUDGE



Sustained. Mrs. Hollander, please refrain from that sort of…



CORINNE



I just meant he looked like he was feeling guilty.



HANNAH



Your Honor? Please?



JUDGE



Mrs. Hollander. Find a different word for it, please.



CORINNE



Okay. I didn’t mean anything. Just that he felt bad about what happened. Like that was the reason he couldn’t look any of us in the eye.



(Slaughter’s gaze dances across the jury, settling briefly back on his witness. Then he turns to the Judge with a half smile…



SLAUGHTER



Nothing further, Your Honor.



…and heads back to his seat.)



*



In her cross-examination, Hannah, Father’s lawyer, would establish two important things: (1) Father wasn’t the first doctor to worry about the Hollander family using beta-blockers to treat their long QT syndrome; Corinne had attested to that fact herself. (2) He was certainly not a disengaged caregiver. On the latter point, Hannah was able to interpolate into the session an anecdote about Father’s troubles with the state years prior for insurance-only billing. Back in the ’90s, if one of his patients didn’t have coverage and couldn’t afford to pay, he didn’t even send them an invoice. The state found out and reprimanded him. Chip Slaughter objected vociferously to her clearly instrumental digression. The judge sustained his objections, and the jury was instructed to ignore what they’d just heard. Little matter. The point was made. Father was the sort of doctor in it for the right reasons. He cared…by definition.

In the wake of Corinne’s powerful testimony on behalf of her daughter, these were the necessary rebuttals, and Hannah made them effectively, even forcefully. But as I watched her work, skillfully building her argument, pacing in her dark Mephisto wedges and long navy jacket, eyeing witness and jury through light, clear eyeglass frames that matched her pearls as well as the white highlights in her salt-and-pepper A-line bob—and in an accent that stood out for barely sounding like one; she was from Maryland—I couldn’t help but feel uneasy. There was no gentle, rippling laughter in the jury, no sounds of recognition—just silence. I’d never been in a courtroom before, and I was surprised at how similar it felt to sitting with an audience as it watched a play. Years of putting up plays in front of audiences left me with little mystery when it came to their shifts in collective mood. I was rarely unclear about an audience’s moment-to-moment interest—avid or riven; when its sympathies shifted; when the plot was lost. The jury’s mood seemed no less obvious. In this case, with Hannah, it was one of suspicion. To them, she was going after someone whom they now saw as one of their own. Hannah was another outsider who just didn’t get it.

Some of this Hannah was aware of—or so she claimed over dinner that night. I met her alone; Father didn’t want to go out. The restaurant she suggested was a defunct paper mill now converted into a gourmet restaurant that served locally sourced food. Paper had once been the thing in these parts, until the early aughts, when it became cheaper to cut down local trees and pile them into containers to be sent to China, pulped into paper there, then packaged, shipped back across the ocean, and loaded onto American trucks for domestic delivery. It wasn’t just paper. This was the model for all the long-standing local industries: furniture, stamping, tool and die. Even lumber was having trouble keeping up with forests halfway across the planet, where gene-edited trees produced stronger, softer wood in larger quantities than the natural forests in Wisconsin ever would. And in so many of these erstwhile factories, mills, lofts, and warehouses—buildings that were often the very reason these towns even existed—antiques were now sold, candles made, Pilates taught, incense burned, and cavatelli served with venison ragù. The last was described on this La Crosse eatery’s menu as the chef’s homespun homage to his father, a hunter who loved few things more than his freshly hunted deer meat. I wasn’t tempted. I ordered a burger with Gruyère from Monroe. Hannah had a frisée Cobb salad with pork-belly bits from local pigs. She’d ordered Merlot, which sat idly in a stemless glass alongside her smartphone. She seemed to be making a show of not drinking it.