by Jill Ciment
It is just before dawn. Pink vapors are coming off the lake. The water is warmer than the air. She opens the slider for a moment. The insects and frogs are louder than New York traffic, the music of her youth.
* * *
· · ·
Her husband lingers over his coffee after breakfast the next morning, the local paper open next to his elbow on the kitchen table.
As she reaches for the milk, she skims the stories above the fold.
WILL FREE LOVE LEAD TO FREEDOM?: ANCA BUTLER’S ATTORNEY WANTS A NEW TRIAL ON THE CLAIM THAT JURORS HAD SEX.
She knows by his incredulous yet titillated expression that he is reading the story. She retrieves her empty hand, the milk carton forgotten.
“Did you know?” he asks.
He takes her silence for a yes.
“Which jurors?”
When she doesn’t answer again, he guesses: “The anatomy professor and the schoolteacher, the one you called ‘hot date.’ ”
When she doesn’t concur with his guess, he lobs another possibility. “The anatomy professor and the chemical engineer.”
“Why are you so sure it was a man and a woman?”
It takes all her control and strength to maintain her light, gossipy smirk as she reads the story for herself. That smirk weighs a thousand pounds.
“The schoolteacher and the chemical engineer?”
“Why not Cornrows and the church lady?”
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“I’m under oath.”
“You know you can’t keep secrets from me.” He pours himself a fresh coffee. “Cornrows and the alternate?”
Her husband’s gift as a journalist had been his canny ability to suss out secrets from diplomats and generals. His editors thought he had a special talent, but Hannah knew it was just unrelenting persistence.
At lunch, he says, “Vegas odds agree with me, six to one, the schoolteacher and the anatomy professor.”
Having grown up in Vegas, Hannah knows that book is made on anything: the length of the last note of Lady Gaga’s “Star-Spangled Banner”—“BRAAAAVE”—during the Super Bowl, whether or not any of the Kardashians will appear at O.J.’s parole hearing, where space station Skylab’s wreckage will fall to Earth.
“Did you bet?” she asks.
“Of course not. Don’t you want to know what your odds are?”
“Don’t you have a memoir to write?”
* * *
· · ·
She is in a cell where the lights never go out and a white-noise machine is cranked up full volume and every time merciful sleep catches up to her, a bucket of ice water is thrown over her naked body. That’s what waiting for her husband’s next interrogation feels like.
* * *
· · ·
Next morning, forbidden to publish the jurors’ names, only their letters and numbers, the Sentinel profiles the six with facts gleaned from the voir dire.
Her husband reads aloud, “ ‘C-2 is a middle-aged married woman who moved to Alachua County ten years ago. She is a photographer. She had no prior knowledge of the case. She swims for recreation. During the voir dire, when asked why she married her husband, her answer was “To save money on taxes.” ’ ”
“Did you really say that?”
“Because it’s true.”
He continues reading: “ ‘B-7 is a young single woman who grew up in Williston, Florida, and teaches middle school. She heard about the case in church. She is a pet lover. She enjoys salsa dancing.’
“Salsa dancing?” he says. “I bet that ups the odds.”
After dinner, he watches cable news in the living room, while she remains in the kitchen reading F-17’s profile. It tells nothing she doesn’t already know, yet she reads it twice before texting him.
did you see the sentinel?
She waits while he reads the article on his phone.
it’s unconscionable, but it’s irrelevant.
vegas is already making book on which jurors had the affair, she types.
“Get in here. B-7 is on CNN,” her husband calls.
the schoolteacher is on tv, she informs Graham, then hurries to the living room.
Dressed in baggy, androgynous clothes, her face pixilated, her voice intentionally distorted, she speaks with garbled urgency. She says she never had sex with another juror. Her life has been ruined. She will have to take a leave from her job and move out of the state. She says that now that professions have been leaked, the media should take a look at the anatomy professor and the photographer.
Her husband is never still: his feet tap, he scratches his arm, he examines his scalp, he cleans his fingernails, he wipes his glasses, he picks at the armrest. Stillness is antithetical to the atoms that give him energy. Yet he is still now. He looks at her as if he doesn’t recognize her. His face tightens with rage, then abruptly loosens in anguish. At sixty, he might have punched a wall. At seventy, he might have punished her with silence. But at eighty-six, he sits back to catch his breath.
“Do you love him?”
“No.” She begins her confession with a certainty she isn’t certain of. The apology comes next, but he doesn’t want to hear it.
“Let me talk! Are you going to keep seeing him?”
“It’s over.”
“Maybe for you. For me, it’s just beginning.”
He stands up too quickly, falters, gropes for the sofa’s armrest, waits for the blood to return to his head. His breath quickens.
“Are you okay?” she asks cautiously.
“How could I be okay?”
He sinks down again, as if he realizes he has nowhere to go.
“Why?” he asks.
She tells him the truth as she understands it, which isn’t much. “I wanted a last dalliance before I got too old.”
“You couldn’t wait until I’m dead?”
His feet tap, he scratches his arm, rubs his cheeks.
“Everyone knows,” he says.
“Our names haven’t been released.”
“Yet.”
He grabs his phone, pokes the screen with his unsteady index finger.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Shut up!”
He turns the screen around. The site is VegasINSIDER.com.
“The odds have already turned in your favor,” he says.
He picks at the armrest, examines his scalp.
“I want you to leave.”
“May I pack a few things first?”
“Where are you going?”
“To a motel.”
“Not to him?”
“It’s over,” she repeats.
As she opens the front door to leave, he says, “You can sleep in your studio tonight.”
She arranges clean sheets on her daybed. Even though the studio door is shut, his pain and hurt waft under the jamb, like gas, and choke her. She is tempted to return to their bedroom to assure him, once again, that it’s over, but she suspects the repetition of that assurance will have the opposite effect.
Around midnight, after the lights around the house go out, she slips back into the kitchen for food. She hasn’t eaten since breakfast. As she opens the fridge, she spies her husband in the arctic gloom, seated at the kitchen table. He doesn’t react to the sudden light. The stillness he now occupies is of a very different order than the afternoon’s. The stillness is no longer suppressed anxiousness. This stillness is closer to hardened wax.
She sits across from him. His eyes are closed, as if he is listening to something very faint. He doesn’t acknowledge her presence. She waits patiently and then not so patiently. “Are you okay?” she says at last.
“My heart keeps skipping a beat. I think something’s wrong with my pacemake
r. It’s supposed to give off a beep when the battery runs low. Could you listen?”
She leans her ear against his barrel chest, against his skin. His heartbeat sounds like a faint but steady hammering on a pipe in a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean, a signal to the outside world that someone is still alive.
“I don’t hear any beeping,” she says.
The look he gives her is harsher than accusation, blame, jealousy, wrath. The look is distrust. He doesn’t believe her answer.
She retrieves her laptop from the studio. They listen to an online audio recording of a pacemaker’s alarm just to be sure. When the battery is low, the sound resembles a distant truck backing up. When the battery is about to die, the sound becomes more urgent and resembles the siren the Nazis blared on their way to arrest Jews.
She listens again, ear to skin. Her husband had rickets as a child, and his fourth rib, deformed by lack of vitamin D, jabs against her temple like a club.
“The battery is fine,” she says.
Without asking permission, she returns with him to their bed. She positions herself on the narrowest margin of mattress. He doesn’t object.
“You’ll wake me if your heart starts skipping?”
He doesn’t acknowledge her, but she knows he will.
He is gone when she wakes up the next morning. When he returns around noon, he says, “If you’re staying out of pity for an old man, you can leave now. The cardiologist just told me my heart is as strong as a man half my age.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“Because you can leave without guilt?”
He sits on the sofa, stands, sits, half rises, then sinks again, this time for the count of ten.
“I know what living with an old man is costing you,” he says. His voice has lost its biblical rage. She has to lean close to hear what he says next. “It’s only going to get harder. Maybe you should leave? I’m scared.”
When she reaches for his hand, he jerks it back. “How could you do this to me?”
* * *
· · ·
She hears him on the phone with Lenny. His study door is shut, but the door is hollow. She can make out an occasional word. He must be telling his old friend about her betrayal. She hears her name. Her husband is silent for a long time after that. Lenny must be consoling him, or maybe men only advise? Can Lenny sincerely say “You’ll get through this” to an eighty-six-year-old man? Or maybe that’s exactly what Lenny is saying: “Your heart is as strong as a man half your age, you’ll get through this.”
When her husband comes out of his study, he looks as if he has endured a bloodletting. He touches the wall to steady himself. She follows him into the bedroom, uninvited.
“Is it your heart again?” she asks.
Without looking at her, he says, “The judge is going ahead with sentencing next Monday, after which she will release your names.”
“Lenny said that?”
“Get out. I need to prepare myself,” he says.
What does returning to bed at eleven o’clock in the morning prepare you for? Though she hasn’t yet phrased the question aloud, he says, “Public humiliation.”
She sits on the edge of the bed, uninvited.
“Please leave me alone,” he says.
Before she reaches the door, he says, “I can’t catch my breath.”
She returns to his side. He allows her to rub his back. She takes the risk and holds him. He stiffens but doesn’t object.
“Take deep breaths,” she says. “You’re having an anxiety attack.”
“You aren’t?”
He inhales and exhales deeply, as if he is blowing up a balloon.
Should she console him? Your heart is as strong as a man half your age, you’ll get through it.
“We’ll get through this,” she says.
They make love for the first time since her return, almost a month ago. Her husband’s need to prove to himself that his heart is as strong as a man half his age is greater than his need for her. His erection acts as a barometer of his moods. She can feel him soften. She doubts he reached a climax, but it hardly matters. The deed is done. All happy marriages have sex; all unhappy marriages don’t.
* * *
· · ·
As he walks naked to the bathroom the next morning, Hannah notices that the left side of his rib cage is bruised, as if they had wrestled last night rather than had sex. When he sees himself in the medicine cabinet mirror, he asks, “Did you hit me?”
“Why would you ask that?” she says, though she herself is wondering the same thing—was there a moment during sex when things got rough?
He stands in the doorway, his robe still hanging from a peg. He is getting shorter every day. His vertebrae are eroding. The rest of him, especially his torso and the organs within, have had to compact themselves into a smaller space with a lower ceiling. How do they all fit? Acting more like a basket than a cage, the ribs almost touch his hips. It would have been unthinkable to have rough sex with such frailty.
“I must have bumped myself. Did you notice it last night?” he asks.
The size of a fist, the bruise covers his clavicle down to the fourth rib, the club. She hadn’t noticed it, but then again, her eyes had been closed. It is hard to make love to all that fragility with your eyes open.
“Should you have a doctor look at it?” she asks.
“Which one? Leavitt?”
“I don’t know your doctors’ names.”
“My blood guy. Or should I just drive over to one of those twenty-four-hour doc-in-a-boxes?”
“I don’t think it’s an emergency.”
Later, she hears him on the phone. He is telling the listener—his hematologist’s nurse—about the bruise on his chest, and another bruise he didn’t mention to Hannah, on his hip last week.
“Why didn’t you mention the bruise on your hip?” she asks after he hangs up.
“I had other things on my mind.”
* * *
· · ·
Late Friday afternoon, a letter arrives from the court. Her husband answers the door, waits impatiently as Hannah opens the envelope.
The jurors’ names will be released Monday, as Lenny had warned them. Hannah reads, “The court will do its utmost to protect you, our citizen-soldiers, who have done your duty and have been discharged. Media, or anyone else, attempting to contact the jury after the release of jurors’ identities will be in contempt of court. Jurors who wish to discuss their service with the media are free to volunteer to do so at a press conference following the sentencing. The court will not allow this jury to be subjected to further intrusions into their private lives.”
Whatever intimacy was rekindled during sex is immediately doused. His posture, which had slowly been straightening as he got his footing again, collapses. With a shortened spine, the collapse is far more angled than crumbling, a balancing rock that shifts but doesn’t fall. His chin juts out, one shoulder rises, the other slopes, and a small ridge forms on his back.
“Are you going to speak at the press conference?” he asks.
A response isn’t necessary. “Do you want to go away, somewhere, just get on a plane?”
“Alone?”
Once the boulder slips, it can’t be re-righted.
“Together,” she says.
“I don’t know if I can go anywhere with you.”
That night, she wakes to the sensation of being trapped under an avalanche with a hot engine. She reaches across the bed, keeping her hand above his brow so as not to wake him. The heat is emanating from his skin. The sheets around him are damp from sweat.
Can someone have a panic attack in their sleep?
Angling her tablet’s bright screen so as not to disturb him, she reads, Nocturnal panic attacks include rapid heart rate, trembling, s
hortness of breath, hyperventilation, flushing or chills, sweats. People perspire when they fear danger so that the body’s water can be eliminated through the skin rather than through the kidneys—so that you don’t have to stop to urinate in the midst of defending yourself from danger or escaping harm.
Even in a dream?
In a nightmare.
Sunday morning, he announces his plans. After he sees his blood guy, he is leaving the country. He doesn’t say where. For the remainder of the day, he doesn’t behave like a man preparing for a long trip. He looks more like a man preparing for an enormous wave to drag him to the bottom of the ocean without a pipe to hammer on for help.
* * *
· · ·
Hannah sits in the living room on Monday morning watching the courthouse’s plaza in real time on her tablet, courtesy of a website she found over the weekend, AbovetheLaw.org. Her husband is in his study, though she doubts he is playing Solitaire.
The protestors are back, but the webcam isn’t angled in their favor. A picket sign is occasionally thrust into view but too fast to read.
At ten sharp, the courthouse doors open. The first reporter out is the university alum who aspires to be a crime reporter. Youthful and fit, she sprints across the plaza to her cameraman, and begins talking without any sign that she just did a hundred-yard dash in under fifteen seconds. Next out, the middle-aged CNN reporter, not as fit, and looking as if he has opened an oven door. His shirt darkens with sweat. He stands close enough to the webcam for the microphone to pick up his voice.
Anca has been sentenced to fourteen years, the first two of which will be served in a juvenile facility.
The webcam suddenly goes dead, which doesn’t trouble Hannah. She is not interested in the hoopla that follows the sentencing. She is waiting for the press conference arranged for any juror who wants their fifteen minutes in the limelight.
The webcam goes live again. It is now set up in the room where the original pool of potential jurors waited for their numbers to be called. A bouquet of microphones is set up in front. Minutes pass and no one comes forward.
