Southern Lady Code: Essays(30)

At last I’m noticed. I don’t belong. But I’m staying.

I say, “Special interest.”

“Are you here for the defendant? I’m looking for her family.”

I turn into Forrest Gump when asked by Lieutenant Dan if he and Bubba are twins. I say, “We are not relation.”

The judge calls us back into the courtroom and announces that Juror #7 fainted and has been excused from the jury. She’ll be replaced with an alternate. The trial will continue, but we’ll adjourn for the day.

That night, Meredith tells me that the juror really shook her up. The woman was completely unresponsive for a minute and thirty seconds. They’d thought she’d had a heart attack from the shock of the autopsy photos and was dead.

The medical examiner went to her aid, roused her, and later whispered to Meredith, “It’s the first time in years I’ve felt for a pulse.”

Meredith asks me, “By the way, what did you think of the medical examiner?”

I say, “I want you to seduce him and bring him into our circle of friends.”

Meredith and I are part of a close group. She and I play poker with the men and read books for book club with the women. All together, we have supper and see movies. We celebrate promotions and clean bills of health. We’ve rung in the New Year. And birthdays are big. The best gift Meredith has ever given me was surprising me dressed as a 1950s housewife for a party. Outside the courtroom, she’s always in jeans and T-shirts. Like I said, she is serious. But for me, she was silly. We are good friends but during the trial have fallen into a new and more intimate routine. Every night we speak. And I know this is my chance to be serious for her.

The defendant is a good witness. She’s been in jail for two years and is on two kinds of medications: an antipsychotic and an antidepressant. She speaks softly. Her nails are filed and her hands are delicate. She wears eyeglasses and lifts them to wipe her tears. Her story is that the victim came to her apartment and verbally attacked her.

The defendant says: “Words are weapons.”

The defendant says: “I felt cornered.”

She snapped. The knife she grabbed was meant to peel apples. It’s small, so it doesn’t reason that she’d wanted to kill her. But she did.

The defendant says: “I felt like a monster.”

But then she saved the baby.

The defendant says: “I felt happy.”

The defendant says: “I still believe I did something wrong, but I also believe that God forgives.”

The judge nudges a tissue box toward her. Maybe she did snap.

In my notepad I write: Could we lose?

But then Meredith cross-examines her. And Meredith is not deterred by her tears or soft lies. She gently but persistently hammers the young woman with questions like she’s tapping a picture hook into a wall. Tap, tap, tap. The picture starts to change. Tap, tap, tap. Like a trick of the eye in a haunted house, the defendant’s portrait morphs from meek to maniacal.

An audience member, who as far as I know has seen ten minutes out of ten days of trial, gets up, steps over my knees, and says under her breath: “I think I heard enough. THIS IS SOME BULLSHIT!”

On break, I text this to our book club and it becomes our war cry. “This is some bullshit!”

The jury thinks so too. After closing arguments, it takes them less than five hours to find the defendant guilty of all charges. Meredith wins.

A month later, we are back for sentencing.

As usual, I arrive fifteen minutes before the courtroom doors are unlocked to make sure I get a good seat. The media are already here. And now it’s not just city paper reporters; the TV people are here. NBC and CBS. They wear pancake makeup, and one woman wears thigh-high boots and a Band-Aid-tight dress in blood red. Court officers pen them in with three barricades. When the doors open, I walk right past.

No one stops me because now I know I belong.

The serious women in the serious room have softened. The judge has dyed her hair chestnut. The defense attorney is tan from a trip to Bermuda. When Meredith speaks on behalf of the family, her voice quivers, but it is clear.

Meredith says, “We have so little we can do or change, but we can offer justice for this horrific and unspeakable act that destroyed so many lives.” She says she spoke to the victim’s mother about sentencing, and here is what the silent religious woman told her: “The defendant can ask God for forgiveness. And if he forgives her, she can go to heaven. From prison.”

Meredith says, “She is more forgiving than me.”

Meredith asks the judge for the strongest maximum sentence: twenty-five to life for murder, twenty-five to life for felony murder, and twenty-five years for kidnapping.

The defense attorney asks for sentencing with compassion.

The defendant sobs and says she’s sorry.

The judge says to the defendant: “Your young age doesn’t matter.”

The judge says to the defendant: “Your abuse doesn’t matter.”

The judge says to the defendant: “These were not impulsive cuts.”

The judge says to the defendant: “You are a monster.”

The judge sentences the defendant so that she will never be free.

As I’m walking out of the courthouse, I am chased down the sidewalk by a reporter who says, “I never found out who you’re with.”

I say what I said to her before. “Special interest.”