No One Knows Us Here(97)

Calvin paused here and leveled his gaze once again at the judge, then at each member of the jury. He laughed a bit, as if he had at that moment recalled a private joke. His head shook back and forth. Courtroom theatrics, reporters would call it later. When he spoke again, his voice was louder and more urgent than before. “The prosecution asks why she didn’t leave.” He jerked his head once, disgusted by the very question. “Why didn’t she leave?” He was almost shouting now. His words echoed through the courtroom. He looked again at the jury, at the entire courtroom audience.

I looked back, too. Jamila caught my eye and nodded once. Wendy and Hannah sat together, so mesmerized by Calvin’s performance that they didn’t notice me. I turned to the jury. Calvin had them spellbound. They were leaning in, toward him, like he was a magician onstage. Like he was a rock star. They didn’t want to miss anything. This was good, I thought. They liked him. They bought into him.

“Leo Glass manipulated my client from the start. He spied on her, by his own admission. He spied on her sister, a minor. Fourteen years old. Leo Glass isolated Miss Rabourne from her friends. He paid her for her friendship, for her companionship. He insisted she get an IUD and then what did he do? He yanked it out of her body with his bare hands. So why didn’t she leave?” he asked again, incredulous. Dramatic pause. He surveyed the audience. His face wide open. Eyes big. The courtroom was silent. He had them—the judge, the jury, everyone, in his thrall. His voice rose for the finish. “She didn’t leave because she FOUGHT BACK.” His voice boomed out and the courtroom erupted. His words were met with whoops and claps and, yes, a few boos, too. Some people in the audience stood up, their hands furiously clapping.

It was epic, really, and ridiculous. Even I had to admit that, how ridiculous it was. I realized I was smiling, that my smile was huge, spreading across my whole face. I might have exclaimed something, something like “Ha!” and bounced in my seat. I got caught up in it. We all did.

The judge pounded the gavel, over and over, demanding order in his courtroom.



The jury deliberated for forty-five minutes. They filed back in, one after the other, and took their seats. A young woman on the jury raised her eyebrows at me, and the corners of her mouth turned up. Her eyes sparked. That’s when I knew they were going to let me go.





PART THREE





CHAPTER 33


We had to move away from Portland after the trial. We tried several places, each one farther and farther away, until we wound up here, in this city, this city in a whole new country, on a whole new continent. I don’t want to name it, this city, but it wouldn’t be difficult to figure it out.

By the time we got here, it had died down a bit, the media circus. They had turned me into a feminist icon. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing that image of the fist holding up the bloody knife. The country—the world—flocked to social media to tell their stories. The hashtags #whyIdidntleave, #howIleft, and #Ifoughtback all went viral. A photograph of me, raising my fist in triumph as the verdict was read, appeared on the cover of every newspaper and magazine in the country.

The most famous one was digitally altered to turn the subdued gray skirt suit I’d been wearing that day into bubble-gum pink. In my raised fist, they’d added a carving knife slick with blood. That was how I was being immortalized, dressed in pink, raising a knife in the air, a gigantic, full-toothed grin on my face. People stopped me on the street. I never knew if they were going to throw their arms around me or spit in my face. Wherever I went, I braced myself for either, or both.

We had to get away. First to Seattle, then to New York City. Now here. It had been Wendy’s idea, moving here, across the Atlantic, in the middle of a whole new continent. Why there? I had asked her when she proposed it. I thought she’d suggest an island, somewhere hot where we could lie on white sandy beaches all day, drinking pi?a coladas out of pineapples.

But no, Wendy had insisted we move to this place, to this exact city. After eight weeks it already felt like home, like we could settle in here for good, make a life for ourselves. No one recognized me, or if they did, no one bothered me, running up to snap my picture or demand an autograph. Wendy started going to an international high school, and I was taking language lessons in the morning. After the lessons, I went to a coffee shop and sat on velvet benches with my classmates, a menagerie of students ranging from age eighteen to seventy-six, hailing from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. We drank espresso out of little white cups.

I spent the late-fall afternoons in our attic apartment that looked out over the rooftops and spires of the city, this beautiful old-world city with its gardens and churches. I went upstairs and sat at a little desk under the sloped ceiling and looked out at the darkening sky and wrote. I started with the fires, the smoke that had choked out Portland that day when Wendy showed up at my doorstep, begging for me to take her in. That seemed like the right place to begin.

I wrote most of it in a rush. Hundreds of pages, thousands of words tumbling out. I couldn’t get them out fast enough, the words, to cover everything I’d been through, everything that had happened. I was tempted to make Leo worse than he was. I considered turning him into a more sinister character. He could have humiliated me, threatened me. I could have had him cup the back of my head in his palm and slam my head against the cupboards that night. I could write that and they’d publish it, and everyone would believe it. It fit in nicely with the narrative they created. The story everyone wanted to believe.