by Jill Ciment
“Fine,” she says.
“Here. I’ll sit up and you can lie down,” he says.
“I’m being ridiculous.” She reclines beside him. Then, to her surprise, she adds, “It’s not like we can lock the door.”
* * *
· · ·
C-2 can’t concentrate on Salieri’s jealousy of Mozart any more than she could on Jack Reacher’s fisticuffs or Emma Bovary’s vexation at the way her husband slurps soup.
She didn’t come to F-17’s room for the music alone. She is curious to see if their flirtation can withstand the harrowing stories they were told this afternoon. A flirtation would make the sequestered nights more interesting.
His hands are folded behind his head—she can see his palmaris muscle. His ankles are crossed. He has beautiful feet.
She would like one last dalliance before she gets too old. She’s done the math. If her husband lives another ten years, his mother’s life-span, she will be sixty-two—young for a widow, but old for a dalliance.
She is fairly certain that he isn’t watching the movie either. But fairly isn’t certain. What if she is delusional—or, worse, pathetic?
She closes her eyes. There is only music now, and a palpable awareness of his body next to hers. Don Giovanni is playing. The saddest opera, and the saddest song in the saddest opera is sung by Death.
She rolls over and kisses him.
After a surprised hesitation, he kisses her back. His kiss is lengthy, compelling, carnal and ethereal at once, and she is ashamed of how badly she needed it.
She pulls back, slowly, and opens her eyes. The lights are on. The bedspread is orange and purple. The walls have heel marks. The ceiling is cottage cheese. A band of static cuts across Salieri’s face on the screen. She is once again a fifty-two-year-old woman watching a movie with a fellow juror at an Econo Lodge.
“I’m sorry, this is a mistake,” she says, but she knows she doesn’t sound sorry. She sounds flirtatious, which isn’t her intention. The heady aftermath of the kiss has changed her voice into something she doesn’t recognize.
“Sorry for what?” he asks.
“You need to ask?”
“We are two private citizens doing public service. Our nights are our own.”
“Unless we invite the deputy in to observe us, our nights are not our own,” she says.
He holds her wrist before she can get up, then lets go.
“Thank you,” he says.
“What for?” she says.
“You need to ask?”
He goes downstairs to return the video and distract the deputy, while she slips back into her room. It’s still twilight, not yet nine o’clock. She brought a three weeks’ supply of Ambien, as per the judge’s instructions. She takes one.
Supine, eyes shut, knowing drugged sleep will soon arrive, she allows herself to remember the kiss, but the music, which is playing jarringly loud inside her skull, keeps distracting. Don Giovanni.
The first time she heard the opera was in middle school. Miss Foxx, her music appreciation teacher, had assigned the class to listen to the classical radio station that evening and take notes about how the music made them feel. “Try for the sublime,” Miss Foxx had instructed C-2 and her eleven-year-old classmates, the sons and daughters of casino workers, for whom the only sublime was a jackpot. In Las Vegas, where C-2 lived with her mother in a subdivision with more sand than grass, the assignment was as close to a field trip as the school provided.
C-2 and her mother had owned a cassette player and a TV, but not a radio, except in the car. After dinner, C-2 sat in the garage behind the wheel of her mother’s VW Beetle, and tuned the radio to the local classical station. Her mother had started the engine and left the car in park so that C-2 wouldn’t run down the battery.
At first C-2 felt stupid writing down her feelings about classical music. Without a snappy beat, the music seemed pointless.
On the far side of the Beetle’s windshield, she could see her secondhand bike with its flat tire that her mother never got around to fixing, and the paint cans left over from the time she and her mother had painted her bedroom purple, a favorite color C-2 soon came to hate, and the empty pizza box from dinner sticking out of the trash can. She shut her eyes against all this ugliness, and without warning, there was only music. Blind, she was no longer bored by the music. It made her want to cry.
The garage door opened and her mother had come charging toward her, screaming her name. “What was I thinking?” she told C-2. “You could have died from the fumes.”
C-2 has always wondered if what she experienced in that garage—the sublime, as Miss Foxx named it—resulted from the music or the carbon monoxide. But what stayed with her, what shaped her nature, was that she now knew that the sublime existed and she was just as entitled to it as the girls who had radios in their pretty bedrooms.
It was only a kiss.
F-17 is already at the breakfast table, a folding affair with benches, when C-2 walks into the improvised buffet off the lobby. The church lady is chewing off his ear. As C-2 approaches, his steady amused stare is meant to convey that he has been waiting for her.
“Can I bum a cigarette?” she asks him.
“We’re going outside for a smoke,” he tells the deputy, the ex-military from yesterday.
They walk over to a shaded picnic table near the pool, still within the deputy’s crosshairs. This time when F-17 lights her cigarette, she doesn’t hold it downwind. She inhales.
“I’ve been thinking about you all night,” he says.
“I took an Ambien,” she says.
“I should have been thinking about the trial.”
“It was only a kiss. We’re adults,” she says, but she doesn’t sound like an adult. She takes a second drag. “I forgot how much I miss smoking.”
“You asked me yesterday what causes rapid eye blinking? The longer I observed the defendant, the more convinced I became that she might have blepharospasm, or tardive dyskinesia, the result of all her antipsychotic medications. Blinking is a side effect.”
“Or maybe she’s just daydreaming,” C-2 says, exhaling.
* * *
· · ·
When C-2 and the other jurors take their chairs, the judge bangs her gavel impatiently for the press and the seniors, occupying the back four pews, to be quiet. She threatens exile to anyone who disrupts the proceedings again, then asks if the defense is ready to present opening remarks.
The defense counsel lays a comforting hand on both of the defendant’s shoulders before approaching the jury. Wearing a dark suit with ample room for her full figure, she has her own poster-size photograph to share with the jury—the defendant cradling her little brother Caleb in her arms. Her hair is all black in the picture, shoulder length, bangs that hang past her eyebrows. She looks stiff, but then again, whenever C-2 has been handed an infant by a new mother, she, too, has stiffened. C-2 is childless by choice.
“Anca Butler loved her brother Caleb,” the defense counsel says.
Back at the defense table, her client blinks and blinks and blinks.
“Anca didn’t start the fires. She was in the backyard feeding the family dogs when the fires started. The instant she smelled smoke, she dialed 911. ‘I think I smell smoke,’ Anca told the emergency operator.”
The defense counsel doesn’t quote Anca in a falsetto as the prosecutor did. Instead she speaks the words—“I think I smell smoke”—in the tone of a concerned citizen doing the right thing.
“Only after the 911 operator assured Anca that fire trucks were on their way did Anca see flames in the nursery window. She dropped the phone and ran back into the house to save Caleb, but the fire was everywhere, the heat scorching. You’ll hear the prosecutor talk about Anca’s singed eyelashes as proof that she set the fires. It is the only physical evidence the prosecu
tor has. But what he won’t tell you is that Anca’s long hair wasn’t singed, her bangs weren’t singed, her eyebrows weren’t singed. To understand the significance of her eyelashes being singed while her eyebrows and hair remained untouched, you’ll hear from experts about the dynamics of combustion. Intense heat is capable of singeing off eyelashes while leaving eyebrows unaffected. Anca Butler was never close enough to the fire—let alone close enough to set the fire—to singe her eyebrows and hair.
“When Anca realized she couldn’t reach Caleb, she ran into the street to see if the fire trucks were coming. Her sister Stephana’s boyfriend’s truck was in the driveway, door open, radio playing. A minute later, Tim Rush burst out of the Butlers’ front door, coughing, crazed, and screaming at Anca, ‘What have you done?’
“He told the firemen, local volunteers who went to high school with him, that he had grabbed his fire extinguisher from his truck bed and tried to save Caleb, but it was too late. Caleb was dead. He told the police that Anca had been the only person home with Caleb when the fires started. Did the police test Tim’s hands for traces of accelerant? Did they test his clothes? He was on the scene seconds after the fire started. No, the police took Tim at his word. The police were also locals who had known Tim all his life.”
So far, C-2 has only jotted down:
singed eyelashes
She can’t stop thinking about the kiss, her bravery and his surprised reaction, and then his thorough and captivating response. She glances over at F-17. He isn’t taking notes either.
“So if Anca is innocent, why did she confess?” the defense counsel asks. “You’ll hear from experts about a condition called subordinate-dominance disorder—one twin controls the other. In boys, the disorder typically involves physical abuse, but in twin girls, the abuse is psychological. Anca and Stephana were five years old when the Butlers brought them home from Romania. Anca’s muteness didn’t concern the Butlers at first. They thought that she wasn’t mastering English as fast as Stephana, and that’s why Stephana did all the talking for them both. To help her to speak, the Butlers tried every kind of speech therapy imaginable. When none worked, they turned to psychiatry.”
To force herself to concentrate on the defense counsel’s words, C-2 writes down the list of psychotropic medications Anca has taken over the past ten years—lithium, Tegretol, Divalproex, Lamictal, Depacon, Abilify, Seroquel, Risperdal, Prozac—even though the judge warned the jury not to take obsessive notes instead of paying attention to nuance.
Below C-2, two chairs to her right, she has an unobstructed view of F-17’s open notebook. The page is still empty, his pencil hand still.
“Why did Anca confess to a crime she didn’t commit?” asks the defense counsel, then answers before the jury has a chance to fathom why the blinking teenager might tell a fib that would cost her her life. “Because Anca’s twin, Stephana, the dominant partner in their private pathology, ordered the confession.
“At ten past five, minutes after the firemen had put out the flames, Stephana arrived home from her afterschool job at Popeyes. Tim told her that Caleb was dead and Anca was the only one home. Did Stephana cry? Did she scream? Did she even ask how the fire happened? No. She ran to the backyard to find her sister.
“Anca had taken refuge in the kennel with her beloved dogs. She was in shock, at her most vulnerable. She had no idea how the fire started, but she had already convinced herself that it was somehow her fault. Stephana was alone with Anca for twenty-two minutes—long enough to convince Anca that she was not only negligent, but culpable.”
C-2 looks over at F-17’s notebook. His pencil hand has finally begun to write. In large block letters, he prints:
SMOKE?
Is it a note about the case? Or is it a note to her?
He adds, BEFORE LUNCH.
* * *
· · ·
They stand outside Nic & Gladys, smoking. He too has started inhaling.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he says, but this time when he says it his tone isn’t playful and sexy. His voice is deep and raspy with shame. “A young woman’s life is at stake.”
“I’m so sorry I started this,” she says. She is deeply repentant, but she can’t allow her face to express the guilt she feels. The deputy is watching through the window.
“You didn’t start it,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter who started it, we have to stop it,” she says.
“Agreed,” he says.
Their cigarettes burn down to the filters. The deputy tilts back in his chair to reach over and rap on the glass. Nic and Gladys are already serving.
At the communal table, she sits between Cornrows and the chemical engineer. F-17 takes the chair beside the deputy.
Before C-2 can remember what she ordered, Cornrows brings her and F-17 up to speed. “We’re not going back to court,” she says. “The witness couldn’t get here, so we get to go to a movie. We’re taking a vote. You want to see Magic Mike or Furious 7?”
“Can we opt out?” F-17 asks the deputy.
“How many don’t want to go to the movies?”
Only C-2, F-17, and the chemical engineer raise their hands.
* * *
· · ·
In the van back to the motel, he sits next to her in the middle row. They do not speak.
Back in her room, she stretches out on one of the beds and opens the thriller. She skims, reads the first paragraph over again, absorbs nothing. She goes to the window to see if F-17 is swimming.
He does a strong backstroke, confident he will know the wall is there before he touches it, the sign of a competitive swimmer. His final wind-down consists of a slow breaststroke. Hoisting himself out of the deep end, he stands dripping on the concrete deck. He lets the sun dry him, only toweling off his black hair. He steps into his sandals with his beautiful feet and walks over to a chaise lounge facing C-2’s room. As he sits, he spies her in the window.
Should she coyly step backward into the shadows and pretend she didn’t see him? Why? She will only return to the window a second later to see if he is still looking.
She stares directly at him, and waits for him to look away, but he doesn’t.
The van honks for the movie crowd. The two deputies, ex-military and beauty queen, wrangle about who will go and who will stay behind to guard the party poopers. The beauty queen wins and the van takes off.
Even though C-2 and F-17 are separated by fifty feet, and window glass, she marvels at how easily they can agree on a plan.
She has the better vantage point. She will give the signal as soon as she is certain the ex-military isn’t watching. The signal is closing the drapes.
While she waits for F-17, she considers undressing and climbing into bed, not even pretending to have the talk about responsibility and citizenship. She is now convinced that the best thing for justice will be for them to have sex. At the very least, they will be able to concentrate again.
But waiting naked in bed implies that the choice is entirely hers.
She decides to take a shower instead. He can join her or not.
She hears the door to her room close, the door to the bathroom open. Finally, he slides open the shower door, steps naked into the tub with her, and kisses the back of her neck. She is facing the fiberglass wall, under the showerhead. He turns her around. He already has an erection. Will he fuck her standing up in the tub? How is it even possible? The fiberglass is too slippery despite the nonslip treads. But the longer his kiss lasts, the less the logistics matter. He turns off the water, dries her with a towel, each of her limbs, her breasts. His erection never falters. That sort of male confidence is better than fucking standing up in the shower. He takes her wrist and leads her to bed. She is grateful she had the foresight to turn off the lights and close the blackout curtains. He chooses the twin bed she doesn’t sl
eep on, the one she uses as a dining table, and that only makes his entering her sexier.
C-2 has had affairs before, one-, two-, three-night stands, more to test her moxie and attractiveness than to sate a desire. In truth, she has always preferred her husband to the boys and colleagues with whom she has had assignations on assignment, but lately she hasn’t gone on assignment. Lately, she and her husband have been alone by the lake trying to determine if the bruise on his hip is new.
In the void of abandon, she shirks off the habit of caution. She can bite F-17 or buck or squeeze him as tightly as she dares, and she doesn’t have to worry about bruising him.
* * *
· · ·
Outside, on the walkway connecting the second-story rooms, C-2 hears the other jurors returning. F-17’s penis is still inside her, but the act is over for both of them.
Without exchanging a word, they reach for their clothes. He slips on his wet bathing suit while she peeks out the crevasse of light between the blackout curtains.
“His brother was in a coma,” C-2 hears the alternate’s insistent voice say as he passes in front of the crack, blotting out the sun. “That’s why he killed the guy’s family.”
“His head is too small for his thick neck, he looks like one of those Zika babies,” says Cornrows. “Why would People magazine think he’s the sexiest man alive?”
A minute passes without another word or footfall. C-2 finishes buttoning her blouse, then steps outside as if for a breath of fresh air, while F-17 waits for the all-clear signal. The signal is a sharp tap on the door.
“What you been up to?” asks Cornrows. She is standing in the twilight less than three feet away. “You missed nothing but pinheads and car chases.”
C-2 can’t rally an answer.
“I guess you didn’t hear yet. We get to Skype with our families after dinner, so we voted to eat takeout Chinese here.”
