She was right. Of course she was. She had spent years watching third graders on the playground. But was Caitlin really supposed to tell April that she hated her laugh, that she wanted Heather to shut up for five minutes, and that would everyone please, please stop looking at her like she had all the answers?
More silence. No one wanted to go first.
Okay, she had told Seth that she would have his back. She needed to say something. Not the truth, of course, but something. “Seth, I would have liked to have gotten your help on the exercise equipment.”
“I’m happy to do that,” he said. “We can add that to the schedule. And we need to stretch at lunch, do some yoga or something, so we can sit the rest of the afternoon. I will lead that; it’s no problem. But I’m not sure that that is addressing Joan’s issue.”
Actually it did. People find you unapproachable. You’re a celebrity, an Olympian, a Street of Street Boards.
But she hadn’t said that, had she?
More silence.
Finally April spoke. “I don’t know, I mean, maybe I’m overreacting, but Caitlin—”
Caitlin sat up.
“—I feel like you don’t like me.”
Oh, no. No, no, no. Everyone was looking at her. What was she supposed to say?
“I feel like you’re always trying to avoid me,” April said. “You won’t sit near me. That makes me feel horrible.”
Caitlin wanted to lie. She so wanted to lie. But Joan was a teacher, and even when Caitlin had been pretending to be a depressed art student, she had done what teachers told her. “I don’t dislike you, and I know that I am not getting to know you, but your laugh does grate on me. It’s loud, especially during the movies. It’s not anything else about you; it’s just the sound. I’m so sorry. I really am.”
“And,” Keith added, “you’re smiling all the time.”
“What’s wrong with that?” April asked.
“It just doesn’t seem sincere.”
“As long as we are doing this,” Heather said. She had become April’s friend. If April had been attacked, Heather was going to attack someone else. “Seth, I hate the way that you sit. You hook your arm across the back of your chair, and your foot sprawls out. Sometimes you even put your foot on the rung of someone else’s chair.”
“It is the man-sprawl thing,” Marcus said in his quiet way. “You do seem to feel entitled to take up a lot of space in the world.”
He wasn’t as bad as Fred. But Caitlin was going to let Seth defend himself.
He didn’t. “Ah...I usually run with a pretty competitive group of guys. And I don’t want to sound full of myself here, but when you want media attention, that’s what you want to do, be big. It becomes automatic. But I can try.”
“I’ve always wanted to ask you what it was like to be famous,” Stephanie said. “I can’t imagine it.”
“Then ask. You can ask me anything. If I’ve come across as something other than one of the twelve trying to get through this, I’m sorry. I’m just a regular guy.”
“No, you aren’t.” Keith shook his head. “I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but you went out running with that deputy girl. We were roommates. I woke up one morning, and you were gone. I looked out the window, and the two of you were off. “
Now everyone was looking at Seth, heads cocked, eyebrows drawn close together. No one liked the sound of that. Seth tried to explain, that Andrea had told him she could only go with one person, that he hadn’t known she was off duty, that the judge had called him on the carpet about it. “I did ask her if other people could go. Really I did.”
“Is that why she stopped being assigned to us?” someone asked.
Seth nodded.
“She must have been disappointed by that,” Delia said.
“But when you came back from your meeting with the judge,” Keith said, “you only told us about the bottled water.”
Seth grimaced. “Honestly, I was ashamed. I got a special privilege that no one else did, and that wasn’t right.”
“I think the lesson is that we shouldn’t keep secrets from each other,” Joan said. “Let’s stop sending individual notes to the judge. Let’s act as a unit.”
Everyone seemed to agree with that.
“Can I explain?” April suddenly said. “About why I am laughing so much? I’m doing it on purpose. We all seem so dreary. I know that some people say I don’t have a nice laugh, but I was trying to make it seem like we were having fun. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“We aren’t having fun,” Joan said gently. “So there’s no reason to make it appear like we are. It doesn’t help.”
“It did occur to me,” Delia said, “that if you breathed differently and took some singing lessons, your laughter could be...ah”—Delia was obviously struggling for a polite term—”more melodious.”
“Really? You can change your laugh?”
Delia nodded, and singing lessons were added to the schedule.
Then Keith said that he was uncomfortable with the way Delia had kept correcting Teddy on his manners. “It didn’t seem like your place.”
Delia admitted that Teddy had pushed her buttons. It wouldn’t be hard to be more respectful of everyone else.
“So is that it?” Joan said.
No, it wasn’t, and everyone knew that it wasn’t.
“I know I was wrong to finish the jigsaw puzzle,” Stephanie said, “and I am really, really sorry about that.”
That was not the issue.
Finally Norma had the nerve at least to get close. “I don’t watch many of the movies, but when I do, I don’t want there to be a lot of conversation.”
“Sometimes it would be nice to have some quiet,” Seth agreed.
“I suppose you are talking about me,” Heather said. “Everyone says I talk a lot.”
She was looking around, waiting to be told, that no, it wasn’t a problem, that everyone liked hearing from her.
No one said anything.
“We know you have a heart of gold,” Delia said, “but it’s too much. It is.”
Heather looked mortified.
“And we know that’s your coping mechanism,” Joan said. “You can’t take a vow of silence and expect to survive this. But if you could keep from telling so many stories about your friends and your sister’s friends, that would help.”
“Do I do that?”
“Oh, yes.”
“We know you like people,” Caitlin said. “You want to engage. So maybe you could occasionally ask people questions about themselves.”
This was, she thought, a nobly self-defeating thing for her to say as she was thoroughly sick of having to explain what she was doing every time she stood up to get a glass of water.
“Heather’s not the only one at fault there.” Dave spoke for the first time. “It seems like all you young people have written Keith and me off as old farts not worth knowing. Caitlin’s been nice about the art business, but she’s the only one.”
That was true. Everyone knew it. There was nothing for anyone to say except to promise to do better.
Joan volunteered to draft the note to the judge, and everyone else descended on Dave, trying to appear interested in him, but he escaped with Keith to talk to the innkeeper about the construction project.
The “one for all and all for one” spirit kept Caitlin downstairs for longer than she would have liked, but eventually she felt able to excuse herself. She knew that Seth had seen her leave, so she went straight out to her balcony.
The sun had already set. The mountains were shadowy masses, and the streetlamps were on. The gym’s local members were leaving the fitness center, calling good night to each other.
A few minutes later she heard Seth’s door open.
“We missed the sunset,” she said.
; “But it sounds like we’re going to have plenty of other chances. My sense is that everyone is on board. Joan was really solid, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, and you did a really good job, Seth. I was impressed.”
“You were?” He seemed pleased.
“Do you think that you’ll run Street Boards someday?”
“Me?” He sounded surprised. “Why are you asking that? Mom and Dad are doing such a great job.”
“But not forever. Do your sisters or their husbands want to take over?”
He had to think for a minute. “They’re good at what they do. Really good, but they’re implementing Dad’s ideas.”
“My dad is really enjoying retirement, and he didn’t think that he would.”
Seth was shaking his head. “I can’t imagine my dad retired. He’s been working since he was fourteen. Look, I know in some tiny rational part of my brain that there will come a day when no one wants me to hobble onto a snowboard, but just because my name is Street doesn’t mean I can run anything.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The families were scheduled to visit Sunday afternoon. The need to conceal the jurors’ location had eased—apparently no Mafia hit men were after them—and the families were allowed to come to the inn. All the jurors made their beds and left their doors open so that the families could see all the different rooms.
Caitlin’s parents brought her papers to sign. Her friend Peter had found someone who was thrilled to find a short-term furnished rental in San Francisco. By law she could only charge the rent that she was paying, but Peter had tacked on a separate fee for the rental of her furnishings. The fee seemed absurdly high, but it would take care of her August health insurance and her cell phone bill. What a relief that was.
“I’m not criticizing you,” her mother said, “but I couldn’t believe how much you were paying for such a small place.”
“It does make me wonder why I live there,” Caitlin admitted.
Then Monday came, and the testimony was as tedious as ever, the lawyers as infuriating as ever. Caitlin continued to work on her glossary. In the middle of the afternoon she realized that the prosecutors were calling something an agreement while one defense lawyer was calling the same thing a document and the other one was calling it a letter. Three hours of testimony now made more sense. She would have liked to have shared her finding with the others, but of course she couldn’t.
During the sidebars and other breaks, she started to design a new font—not that the world needed another typeface, and if it did, there were computer programs that took much of the tedium out of the work. But there was something satisfying about doing it by hand, although it would have been nice to have a ruler.
In the evenings at the inn the jurors stuck to their new schedule. Seth led fitness classes, Caitlin taught art lessons, Delia had them all singing scales. The construction foreman left them projects, sanding trim or taping drywall. Stephanie appointed herself in charge of cleaning the public rooms so that the innkeeper didn’t have to hire extra staff.
People were also careful about where they sat. Instead of Joan looking to sit next to Delia, and Heather next to April, they systematically filled the seats on the van and the places about the tables, not making any effort to sit with someone particular.
Each day Caitlin and Seth found a few minutes to be out on their balconies. They never talked about the case or anything that happened in the courtroom. Instead they kept tabs on the other jurors. Should one of them say something to Marcus about a few people finding his food too spicy? No, Marcus would notice what was left on the plates. What about trying to get people to include Yvette more? Yes. Was Joan getting a cold? Yes, but she had already talked to Norma. And Heather? Seth thought she had seemed out of sorts today, and she was usually so sunny. Caitlin said that Heather had mentioned that PMS hit her hard once for a day or so each month; she’d probably be starting her period tomorrow. Seth said that he didn’t want to know that.
“Too bad,” Caitlin said.
These conversations weren’t what Team Jury was supposed to be about. People weren’t to have secrets; everything was to be done by consensus. But teams needed leaders. So they each stood at the railing of their own balcony, looking out at the mountains, always waving to anyone on the patio, talking in low voices. Working with Seth like this felt great. He might be short of perfect, but he was trying. People he would have never paid any attention to before, people who would have been invisible to him, he was treating with respect and consideration.
They talked about other things as well: indie music, graphic novels, their lives in Oregon and San Francisco, where Seth had traveled, where Caitlin would like to travel. She talked about her work; he told her about the two guys he lived with. They talked about their families, and she made him laugh when she told him how uncomfortable it had been to hear her grandmother talk about her grandfather’s physique.
“I guess we were lucky,” he said. “Grandpa only talked about the first time Granny let him hold her hand. He never forgot it. He said it seemed like the softest thing he had ever felt.”
Caitlin looked at her hands. They were resting on the handrail. There was still enough light that she could see the ink stain on her right index finger. She had been helping April and the others letter their scrapbook pages.
Seth’s hands were also on the handrail.
The railing ran continuously from her half of the balcony to his; the wall stopped just short of it. If she slid her hand along toward his side, would he move his hand to meet hers?
We’ve had sex. Why am I thinking about letting him hold my hand?
The sun was setting behind the green-topped mountains. The blazing ball of saffron was melting into a swirl first of corals and pinks. It would soon fade into lavenders and grays. The sunset in San Francisco was a thin band of fiery yellow slashing across the ocean horizon.
“Do you ever think,” he asked quietly, “if we—our generation—have screwed things up for ourselves by making sex so easy?”
“That it doesn’t mean enough?” She had to look at him. She couldn’t talk about this looking at the mountains.
“Something like that, yeah.”
Was he regretting that time at the lake? At least he had tried to make it meaningful. He had tried to connect it to what they had shared in the past.
“I did that the night we were together, tried to turn it into a nothing hookup.”
“Oh.” He took a step back and clasped his hands behind his neck. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
Was he hurt? His hands weren’t on the railing anymore. “No, you don’t understand. It was special to see you, and I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to show you—myself—that I was in control, that I was this cool chick you couldn’t hurt.”
“You didn’t trust me.” His voice was flat.
“That wasn’t fair,” she said urgently. Why was all this coming out now, just when she was starting to respect him so much? “I didn’t know you, not as you are now.”
He dropped his hands. When he looked at her, his grin was mischievous. “Can I point out that having sex with me is kind of an odd way to keep me at arm’s length?”
“I never said that it worked.”
* * * *
Among the requests that the jury had submitted to the judge on Monday had been to be allowed to drink alcohol on Friday and Saturday evenings. The innkeeper had offered to purchase wine. Because the jurors were helping with the housekeeping and some of the construction, he was saving money on staff.
None of them had felt very strongly about needing alcohol. They had included the request because they assumed that the judge would need to refuse at least one thing to show that he was in charge. So they were surprised that during the return van ride on Friday, Sally told them the inn would be hosting a happy hour. There were rules, of course. Jurors could not drink in their room
s, and they were restricted to the wine that the inn provided.
“Is there a two-drink maximum?” Seth asked.
Sally looked at her clipboard. “No, there’s nothing about that.”
“What was that about a two-drink maximum?” Caitlin asked him as they were crossing the parking lot.
“I don’t think that this is such a good idea,” he answered. “Is drinking going to bring out the best in us?”
“Maybe not, but honestly I don’t care.”
“Then prepared to be annoyed.”
He had a point. April was trying to breathe while she laughed, and someone had given Heather a rubber band to wear around her wrist. Every time she started to speak, she snapped the rubber band to remind her not to tell stories about friends of friends, but to ask others about themselves. It was helping a lot, but after a glass of two or wine, everyone would almost certainly revert to usual habits. She imagined that by the end of the night Seth himself would be man-sprawling all over God’s green earth.
The innkeeper had laid out a spread of cheese and smoked sausage, along with apples, grapes, and crackers. Everyone told Marcus that he wouldn’t need to cook.
There was a red wine and a white wine. Caitlin chose the red. It didn’t have any of the complexity of what she drank with her friends in San Francisco, but at least it was more fruity than sweet. She stayed on her feet, drifting in and out of conversations. Stephanie was carrying around both kinds of wine, topping off people’s glasses. Caitlin would have found it hard to keep track of how much she was drinking if she was trying to keep track, but she wasn’t. She felt lovely and relaxed.
She drifted over to the table where some of the other women were looking at April’s bridal magazines. It was amazing how people who didn’t even have a boyfriend already knew what they wanted in their weddings.
“What about you, Caitlin?” Heather asked even without snapping her rubber band. “What kind of flowers do you want?”
“I have no idea.” She had never given it a minute’s thought. Honestly, she couldn’t imagine herself having a wedding.
The Fourth Summer Page 16
