by Jill Ciment
“My vote is for bowling,” says the church lady, sprinkling Tabasco on her grits.
“My kids will get such a kick out of me going to the oddatorium!” says Cornrows, poking her hash browns with her fork to see if they are crisp like she ordered.
The beauty queen confers with the ex-military, and they agree to split up the jury, but only if everyone participates in one activity or the other.
“Must we?” asks the chemical engineer.
“You can’t be alone at the motel,” says the beauty queen, “and there are only two of us.”
“Please,” the schoolteacher pleads with the chemical engineer, “I can’t stand another second in that motel room without a TV!”
In the end, the chemical engineer agrees to join the bowling crowd. Cornrows will accompany F-17 and C-2 to the museum.
Since there are only three of them, the deputy takes her squad car. F-17 rides shotgun, C-2 and Cornrows sit in the back, behind the wire mesh protecting officers from the perps. At every stoplight, Cornrows waves to people in the adjacent cars.
At the museum, the beauty queen leaves them on their own so she can talk on her cell with her mother—she has told the three of them she is getting married next week.
At the front counter, thronged with tourists, C-2 and F-17 try to ditch Cornrows while she collects brochures to give her kids. The museum is packed. Bumper-to-bumper strollers. Families are being funneled through a twisting maze of poorly lit exhibits—shrunken heads, the iron lady, a two-headed-calf skull, a wax figure of a giantess shrouded in dust. Someone has stuck a piece of chewed gum on her elbow.
In the crush, he pulls her to him, places his hand around her rib cage just below her breasts. He starts to guide her into an unlit nook for a kiss.
“I found you,” says Cornrows, coming up behind them.
She accompanies them past a backlit X-ray, a human skull tipped backward with a beam of white light piercing it. It takes a moment before C-2 realizes she is looking at a radiogram of someone swallowing a sword.
“Is it real, Doc?” asks Cornrows.
“Appears so,” says F-17. “Swallowing a sword isn’t all that hard. The trick is to linearize the oral cavity as much as possible by leaning the head way back, and then pushing the base of the tongue forward. That’s probably the trickiest part. All of this causes the oral cavity to become a relatively straight shot down to the base of the skull. The other trick is to use a very dull sword.”
Must he give such a thorough explanation and waste so much time?
While Cornrows peers through a microscope to read the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice, they finally lose her again and find themselves in an empty theater playing a documentary about Robert Ripley’s life. The officious narrator’s voice, combined with the barrage of freakish life, and his hand on her thigh, and the starfish in the Prius window, and the crib on fire have all melded together in this dark theater.
“I’m falling in love with you,” he says.
Cornrows makes her way to their row of seats. She whispers to C-2 and F-17, even though the three of them are the only ones in the theater, “He was once voted the most popular man in America.”
“Who?” asks C-2.
“Ripley,” says Cornrows.
The film ends, only to begin again. The three of them exit together, pass the frozen-shadows exhibit.
“Let’s take a picture,” says Cornrows.
“Of what?” asks C-2.
“Our shadows,” says Cornrows, pressing a pulsing red button.
C-2 is momentarily blinded by a flash. On the wall behind are three frozen shadows that they can step away from without disturbing. Cornrows’s shadow is waving. F-17’s shadow is turned toward C-2, his hand extended. C-2 is in profile. Silhouetted, she doesn’t look all that different from her portrait of the old actress.
What is she doing?
* * *
· · ·
He wants to talk about their future. He didn’t tell her what he told her this afternoon without expecting a response.
“I wish we could smoke in this room” is her response.
“I meant what I said,” he says. “I’m in love with you.”
They have not yet had sex. He is lying on top of the covers, fully dressed. Blind in the darkness, she reaches over and strokes his face.
“You know, you always touch my face before giving me bad news.”
“Do I? It’s my only way of seeing you in the dark.”
He sits up. The twin mattress sighs as he rises. “I wanted to live in the dark as a teenager until I realized that ugliness already makes you invisible,” he says.
“What does that mean?”
“You touch my face not to see me.”
He gets up to leave.
“Please don’t go,” she tells him.
“Do you have any feelings for me?” he asks.
“My mother told me that I should never sleep with a man I didn’t love but that I could be in love with someone for a night.”
“It’s been thirteen nights,” he says, but he returns to bed so as not to waste the fourteenth.
C-2 thinks, The point of no return is long past. The point of no return is now a vanishing point on the far horizon, the point that is supposed to put the picture into perspective. All lines lead away from it.
But where do the lines lead after they exit the frame?
C-2 settles into her chair in the jury box on Monday morning, and glances at the gallery to see which members of the Butler family have come to support Anca on the opening day of her defense. Mrs. Butler is there, as she is every day. Beside her sits Mr. Butler, a concave soul who looks pithed of spirit. This is his first day in court since the voir dire. He sits directly behind Anca, but avoids looking at the back of his daughter’s pageboy by staring at the acoustic-board ceiling, his wife’s profile, the flag. Next to him sits the grandmother, a blonde in her mid-eighties. C-2 recognizes her. She has been in court before, but C-2 had assumed she was a member of the “watchers”—the jury’s nickname for the seniors from the Villages.
The defense counsel calls her first witness, a forensic psychiatrist with a front-loaded Ivy League CV and a new haircut, who specializes in the psychology of false confessions.
“What else but guilt,” asks the defense counsel, “would cause an innocent person to confess?”
The psychiatrist starts with statistics. Out of two hundred persons on death row whose convictions were overturned by DNA evidence, one-quarter had falsely confessed. He cites another study, Bedau and Radelet, which identified three hundred and fifty wrongful convictions for capital cases, forty-nine of them caused by false confessions. He offers more fractions: two-thirds of innocent confessors are mentally ill; one-third have IQs lower than seventy; two-thirds think if they confess they can go home.
To C-2’s right, the church lady releases a disconcertingly loud snore, then snaps back to alertness.
“False confessions are categorized into three types: voluntary, coerced-compliant, and coerced-internalized,” continues the psychiatrist. He defines each term in laborious, jargon-clotted verbiage.
The church lady’s head nods forward. C-2 waits a moment to see if she will wake on her own, then reaches over and stirs her shoulder.
“Why did you interrupt me?” the church lady says. “I’m not asleep, but it doesn’t mean I’m awake.”
Halfway through the psychiatrist’s list of reasons why an innocent person might confess—delusion, a morbid desire to attract attention, a passionate impulse to unburden the conscience—the church lady falls asleep again.
This time C-2 decides not to surreptitiously wake her. Instead she raises her hand to attract the attention of the bailiff. He walks the length of the jury rail so that C-2 can whisper her request to him without disrupting the proceedings.
The bailiff approaches the judge. She covers her microphone and he covers his mouth, as if a great secret were about to be told. The judge glances at her watch.
“Let’s take an early lunch,” she says, then turns to the church lady. “Eat lightly.”
During lunch, the church lady self-consciously picks at her food—fried pork chops with macaroni and peas. Cornrows, C-2, and F-17 watch her through the window during their smoke break.
“She’d been sleeping all morning. I didn’t know what else to do,” C-2 says.
“You did the right thing,” F-17 says.
“She told me she didn’t sleep all last night because of the pain,” Cornrows says. “She hurt her back bowling.”
After lunch, the church lady returns to the courthouse with a lidded cup of coffee. The bailiff allows her to bring it with her to the jury box, but she doesn’t know where to put it.
“I wish we had cup holders,” she says to no one in particular.
The forensic psychiatrist returns to the witness chair, and the judge reminds him that he is still under oath. The prosecutor begins his redirect. Despite the prosecutor’s heft, he is springy and combative in his polished shoes.
“Let’s look at your statistics again,” he says to the psychiatrist. “How many false confessions are preceded by sleep deprivation? What is the percentage?”
“About 75 percent.”
“How long was Anca’s interrogation?”
“I would need to see the police report.”
“Less than an hour?”
“Yes.”
The church lady’s head falls forward yet again. It bobs and sways in C-2’s peripheral vision. The judge notices as well, stops the proceedings, and asks the bailiff to please wake up juror number four. As he approaches the sleeping woman, his footfalls are the only sound in the court. He clears his throat loudly, then calls, “Juror number four.”
When the church lady regains consciousness, every eye in the courtroom is on her.
Without singling her out, the judge addresses the jury. She reminds them that they took an oath to try this case according to the evidence, and that means they must remain alert in order to properly follow the evidence. She explains that she has some concerns that not everyone has been able to follow the evidence. She asks if any of them has had such a difficulty. When no one raises their hand, she addresses the church lady.
“Do you believe that you followed all the evidence?”
“Yes,” says the church lady.
“You weren’t asleep during any of the testimony?”
“My eyes were closed, but I was listening,” says the church lady. “I listen to books on tape with my eyes closed.”
Both lawyers call for a sidebar. The lawyers talk at once, but it is only posturing. C-2 can sense that the brouhaha is only for the jury, that the judge and attorneys are all in agreement.
“Juror number four is dismissed,” the judge says.
Stunned, the church lady is led away by the bailiff.
The alternate moves to the seat beside C-2. He winks at her. He is now the sixth member of the jury.
* * *
· · ·
Two more witnesses take the stand that afternoon—another psychiatrist who specializes in autism and an arson expert who refutes everything the prosecutor’s arson expert said. At this rate, the defense will soon rest its case. Who else can they call? Character witnesses? Anca’s mother? She was Caleb’s mother, too. Then the trial will end and C-2 will never see F-17 again. A dull panic thumps over the monotonous voice of the arson expert as he explains his very different conclusion about the fire’s origin. In his opinion, the fire started in Stephana’s room. The paint thinner splashed throughout the house was a diversion. Paint thinner was not the active accelerant.
“What do the burned eyelashes prove?” asks the defense counsel.
“The eyelashes prove that Anca didn’t start the fire. They were singed by heat, not flames. Had she been at the origin of the flame, with all the accelerant the state claims she used, her eyebrows and bangs would have been affected too.”
C-2 looks over at Anca. Her eyelashes are blond, nearly invisible.
When it is the prosecutor’s turn, he whittles his cross down to one question.
“How long after the fire were the forensics done on Anca’s eyelashes?”
“Two weeks.”
The defense rebuts, “What is the growth cycle for an eyelash?”
“Between four to eight weeks, then there is the resting phase, which lasts about a hundred days. To put it another way, if an eyelash fell out it would take at least four weeks to grow back.”
“So doing forensics on an eyelash two weeks after the fire would not change the results?”
“Not in my opinion.”
“The defense rests.”
* * *
· · ·
She hears a loud clang, like metal striking metal. The ice machine lid? Thunder? An accident on the interstate? Then silence. Then another strident stroke. She locates the sound. It is coming from inside his wristwatch, which is ticking next to her ear.
They have just finished having sex.
This is their last night. Tomorrow closing remarks will be heard. They both agree that it would be unethical to sleep together during deliberations.
“Promise me you’ll see me again when this is over,” he says.
“I can’t promise that.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
He pulls out and silently dresses. He should have grabbed her and kissed her. Her husband would have.
C-2 doesn’t entirely believe the prosecutor as he recounts the events leading up to the fire during his summation. Is he too solicitous? Is there a note of self-righteousness in his tone? Is it what he dwells on, and what he leaves out? Is it his vanity, his polished shoes? And then she realizes why she doesn’t believe him: he is telling his account in the present tense. Anca soaks the diapers in paint thinner. Anca lights the match. He leaves out all cause and effect. He offers no reflection. He never uses because. His presentation is staccato, a punch list of Anca’s actions that night and beyond, which he reads off a pad. Anca hides in the kennel. Anca confesses in under an hour after being taken into custody. He finally reaches the end of his account, but it is so unsatisfying without a motive. C-2 prefers Patricia Highsmith’s ending, where the murderess did it because she wanted to be loved.
The defense counsel speaks extemporaneously, never referring to her notes as the prosecutor had. “Dr. Gold testified that it is common for one twin to be dominant and the other submissive. In a healthy twin relationship, one twin dominates physically, in sports, say, the other mentally, in academics or people skills. But in an unhealthy relationship, one twin dominates both physically and mentally. When that happens in boys, the dominating behavior is almost always physical. But in girls, the dominating twin controls the submissive twin psychically, and often becomes the spokesperson for the twinship.
“We know little of Anca and Stephana’s first four years. We have no medical records from that time, except the birth records. Anca’s birth weight was 2.6 pounds, considerably lower than Stephana’s 5.6. A low birth weight predicts submissiveness. Dr. Gold explained to you that even in utero, one twin initiates the majority of coinciding fetal movements.
“Anca’s confession was coerced, not by the police, but by Anca’s own sister, her identical twin, Stephana.”
C-2 has been watching Stephana all morning. She is back beside her mother, who looks hopeful for the first time since the trial began, yet C-2 can see how shamed Mrs. Butler is by her hope. Stephana holds her hand. Stephana is taking the defense co
unsel’s beating without a flinch.
Anca reaches for her third chocolate bar that afternoon.
Stephana sighs dramatically, and then points out to her mother that Anca is sneaking another chocolate bar. Whatever hope Mrs. Butler felt vanishes, and Stephana’s face brightens.
C-2 is sure: Stephana may not have started the fire, but she is guilty.
* * *
· · ·
“You can find the defendant guilty of first-degree murder, or second-degree murder, or, failing that, of a lesser charge, manslaughter,” the judge instructs the jury. It is late Friday afternoon. “The primary distinction between these is intent. The law is designed to treat killing someone intentionally as more blameworthy than doing so without intent or by reckless indifference. Depraved indifference to human life is different from reckless indifference. If the jury finds Anca guilty of depraved indifference, then you may disregard intent and find her guilty of second-degree murder.”
With no more than this cursory explanation of the charges, other than a laminated handout listing them, and no direction by the judge on how the jury should comport itself during deliberations, the jurors retire to the jury room. It is two in the afternoon.
F-17 is the first to speak. He reveals that he has been on a jury before. C-2 is taken aback that he has never mentioned it. He tells the others that the first thing they did on his former jury was elect a foreperson.
“I nominate Doc,” Cornrows volunteers.
“I second,” the schoolteacher says. “Hands?”
C-2 hesitates. He has been avoiding her, or, when they must interact, behaving with aching formality ever since he wordlessly left her bed the other night after she wouldn’t promise to see him again. She isn’t sure she would like the new alteration of power if he became foreman.
Everyone waits for her decision.
