What could be wrong with her? He had no idea. But if he watched her, if he tried to figure it out, the lawyers or the reporters would notice.
The best thing he could do for her was to ignore her. What kind of gallantry was that?
When they got back to the inn, instead of helping the construction workers tidy up their tools and sweep as he and some of the others usually did, he went up to his room and out to the balcony without tapping. Caitlin would come out.
A minute later she did. She was clearly worried. Her features seemed narrow instead of delicate, and her dark eyes were pulling the life out of the rest of her face.
He gestured over the railing, reminding her that there were people in the courtyard and the parking lot. “What’s up?” he asked softly, careful not to look at her.
“I can lip-read. At least a little.”
“What do you mean?” His eyes jerked toward her, and he had to force himself to look away. “No, I know what you mean. But did you just figure this out? I don’t get it.”
She explained how she had been learning unconsciously. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to tell the judge. What if he thinks he has to declare a mistrial? I don’t want all this falling apart because of me when I haven’t heard anything. And I will make sure that I don’t.”
“But what if it comes out afterward?” he asked. “Couldn’t that be grounds for an appeal?”
“Why would it have to come out? I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
You told me. “What if one day you reply to something that you couldn’t have heard? And you know how carefully they are watching us. Somebody is going to notice how you never look up during sidebars. They’ll wonder why.”
“So what should I do?”
He wasn’t sure. Secrets sucked. The top riders in snowboarding practiced in secret now, not wanting others to know what they were working on. Seth hated that. It seemed against everything that sports was about.
That argued for telling the judge. You’d think he would declare “no harm, no foul,” but maybe he was the one person in the state of North Carolina who didn’t follow basketball. Wouldn’t it be a bitch if he took it in his head to declare a mistrial when they had all been trying so hard to keep that from happening?
“Maybe this should be a group decision,” he suggested. “We agreed to discuss everything as a team.” The deputies were leaving them alone a lot.
“Then we will have twelve people knowing. How can twelve people keep a secret? It would definitely come out then.”
She didn’t say much at dinner, and later that evening she tapped on the wall. He went outside. “I gave Sally a note for the judge.”
“So you made up your mind?”
“It was awkward because Sally knows that we decided not to send individual notes to the judge. I could tell that she didn’t want to take it, but of course she had to. I felt bad about putting her in that position.”
Sally was hardly the issue. “Why did you decide to tell the judge?”
Caitlin shrugged. “I thought about my dad. He was a judge. He would say that you don’t keep stuff from the judge. You have to trust the judge.”
“What if the judge is a jackass?”
“That’s what appeals are for.”
* * * *
As soon as they got to the jury room the next morning, Caitlin was called back to the judge’s chambers.
People were surprised. Seth had been called back about the bottled water, and Teddy had been asked if he could continue after Fred had kicked him, but since then the judge hadn’t spoken to any of them individually.
What was going to happen? Seth supposed if the judge were going to declare a mistrial, the remaining eleven jurors would be led back into the courtroom. Ten minutes went by, then twenty.
“What could be taking so long?” people were asking. “What do you think they are talking about?”
Finally the door opened, and it was Caitlin. She met his eyes for a brief instant, then looked down. It took him a moment to understand. She was fiddling with her necklace, but her thumb and forefinger were forming an open circle. She was signaling that everything was okay.
“He wanted to ask me about our morale,” she said. “I told him that we were trying really hard, but that we were sacrificing a lot.”
“Why did that take half an hour?” someone asked.
“Because doesn’t every five-minute conversation around here take at least thirty?”
People laughed, but then someone else asked, “Why did the judge call you?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it had to do with my mom sending me all those boxes at first.”
“We do rely on you too much,” Norma admitted. “Maybe that’s something we need to work on.”
During the rest of the day it was clear to Seth that the judge had discussed Caitlin’s lip-reading with the lawyers. During sidebars they all kept their backs to the jury, and when they were whispering among themselves at their tables, they lifted a piece of paper or a file folder to cover their mouths. Caitlin also did her part. Unless a witness was actually testifying, she kept herself busy with her notebook.
So it had been no harm, no foul.
Wrong. There was plenty of harm.
The question came from Joan, experienced observer, wrangler of eight-year-olds. When Stephanie jumped up after dinner to start cleaning the table, Joan asked her to stay for a moment.
“Caitlin.” Joan’s voice was gentle, even sad. “Are you keeping a secret from the rest of us?”
He wanted to answer for her. He had practice at these impossible questions. Seth, Seth, why aren’t you... Olympics... Seth, Seth, how do you feel when other guys... Caitlin didn’t. She bit her lip and bent her head.
Then she sat up and pushed her hair back. “Yes, I am.” She was looking around the table. “But the judge asked me not to say anything to anyone else. That’s why the meeting took so long. I kept telling him that he was putting me in a nightmare situation.”
“Can you tell us anything?” someone asked.
“No. He was really clear.”
No one liked this.
“I can’t imagine what it would be,” Heather said. “Was it about the drinking the first night? I know I had too much.”
“I don’t feel I can even say what it wasn’t about.”
“Did you go and say something about the rest of us?” Keith asked.
The room was quiet. No one liked that idea.
“I would answer that if I could,” she said.
People were still quiet. Then April looked at Heather, Keith at Dave, Joan at Delia. Seth knew what they were asking. Can we trust her?
“Wait a second,” he said. “Stop and think. We know Caitlin. Don’t you trust her, of all people, not to be some kind of traitor?”
“No, not Caitlin,” Yvette cried out. “Never. She would never do anything wrong.”
But the more alert people were drawing back, now wondering how well they really did know each other.
“Seth.” This was from Norma. “Do you know?”
“No.” Caitlin spoke instantly, before Seth had a chance to react. “No, he doesn’t. Why would he?”
Norma shrugged.
It was a toxic question. It put a thought in people’s minds. Caitlin and Seth, Seth and Caitlin...of course...young and single...the two out-of-towners...the two who play in a bigger ballpark than the rest of us...
Over the next few days it was clear that things had changed. People were less comfortable with Caitlin. What if she were an informer, a tattletale? They were cordial; that was part of being on Team Jury, but, except for faithful Yvette, they didn’t seek her out, they didn’t chat with her. No one decided to go to the gym because she was going. People asked her if she wanted to join in a game, but they were being polite. No one hopped up to rearra
nge chairs when she came in the room. When the construction foreman left jobs for the jurors, Caitlin was always working by herself.
It was so wildly, so desperately unfair. She had done so much to keep them all happy in the early days. Seth wanted to defend her, protect her. But that would increase the suspicion that the two of them had a private bond...which, of course, they did.
He had no idea what to do. That was the trouble with being educated in the bro-school of gallantry. You didn’t learn squat.
“This is really hard on you, isn’t it?” he said out on the balcony.
She shrugged. “I’ve been an outsider before. In fact, I’ve always been an outsider: the kid with the pregnant sister, the only girl in the skateboard park, the one person in the boat who doesn’t row, the only straight person. This was the first time I’ve been the popular girl. But people don’t trust me anymore. That’s what really bothers me. I haven’t had that since my first season as a coxswain.”
That would have been in high school after her family had moved to San Diego. “Why didn’t they trust you? I thought you were really good.”
“I had to learn, and the rowers didn’t know that I don’t make the same mistake twice.”
“Crew races in the spring, doesn’t it? So that would have been right after the Olympics. When I stopped calling.”
“It doesn’t matter now, Seth.”
* * * *
He had been trying to write it off as a strong memory, that strange episode out at the lake when he had felt both like himself now and like a fumbling, enraptured kid. The power of memory. Period. That was it. Nothing more.
But sometimes when he was out on the balcony in the early morning, watching the shadows slide off the mountains and the mist dissolve into the air, he would think that it had to be more. It was as if the love he had felt for her back then had tunneled its way into the present, making the two moments actually happening at once.
But he felt empty inside; he was a kid staring up an empty blue sky, knowing that it wouldn’t snow today.
This trial, this goddamn trial. They didn’t have a chance.
* * * *
Managing Team Jury was now pretty much all on him. His mom should be proud. All those lectures about not being so full of himself...well, look at him now. Out on the slopes he and his crew would have had contemptuous labels for the different jurors—bowling pins, gnats, herbs, spores, chumples—but here he had to be respectful and engaged. April’s fiancé was rebuilding a car; Seth looked at the scrapbook pages she was making about that. He talked about smoking and grilling meats with Dave, soil fertilization with Keith. He played Scrabble even though he was bad at it, really, really bad. He used his own workout time to lure Joan and Delia into the gym. He put them on a regimen of insanely mild strengthening and flexibility exercises in hopes that their knees would feel a little bit better.
He needed to get them to start trusting Caitlin again. She would be essential to the deliberations about guilt or innocence. His parents were in favor of trying another video game, and so he rolled out the idea with—he thought—greater marketing sophistication than they had had for the actual launch of the old one.
He waited until Caitlin was not around. Joan, Yvette, and some of the other women were sitting on the patio. He pulled up a chair. He shared the concept of the game, presenting it as entirely his own idea, and asked Joan, the retired teacher, about making it educational. When she asked him to explain, he started drawing stick figures, deliberately making them even more awful than his limited artistic gifts would have normally produced.
“I would think”—Joan couldn’t help herself—“that a person with such a large head and short legs would have trouble walking, much less snowboarding.”
“Let’s get Caitlin.” Yvette jumped up just as Seth knew that she would. “She can draw it for you.”
Caitlin was chill, acting as if this were the first time she had ever heard about a Street Boards video game. That job in Silicon Valley must have prepared her for other people taking credit for her ideas. She knew that any indication that she and Seth had talked about this beforehand would increase suspicions that the two of them were having private conversations.
Which, of course, they were.
But people were happy to have something new to think about. Over the next few days, all of them were busy working with Caitlin to imagine a game in which a young user could arrange a course that would cause a pixilated Seth either to land a triple cork or to eat snow, boomph, asspass, buff, bonk, and generally have a Leonard kind of day.
* * * *
The trial slogged along. The lawyers had sunk into a morass of petty bickering. The judge was trying to move things along, but the lawyers would always find another way to slow it all down. But to give the lawyers credit, they were trapped. If one side tried to be reasonable, the other side would go for the three-point shot.
On Sunday evening, Caitlin reported that the guy renting her apartment wanted to keep it for another two months.
“Two months?” Seth didn’t like the sound of that. “Do your folks think that the trial will last that long?”
“They don’t let on. They pitched it in terms of knowing what my rent is and said that I could stay with them or go visit Trina until I got my apartment back.”
There was something in her voice. “You do want it back, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. But this does give me another two months without having to worry about my monthly bills.”
Monthly bills...was that what it would be like for his family if Street Boards went under? Going back to having to worry at the end of each month?
* * * *
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...more tedious testimony, more late starts, more angry sidebars.
Thursday started like any other. They got to the courthouse and sat in the jury room. Then sat some more. And some more. Lunch was brought in.
At last they were escorted into the courtroom.
Something was different, very different. There were fewer lawyers at the tables, and none of them had any papers out. No one had given the jurors their notebooks.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the judge said, facing the jury as he spoke. “I apologize that we have kept you waiting yet again.”
He didn’t usually apologize for that. “The attorneys involved have informed me”—he was no longer looking at them—“that the case has been settled. So you are excused with the thanks of the state of North Carolina.”
Settled?
Seth felt himself jerk in his chair. Caitlin had her hand over her mouth. Other jurors had their hands in the air. Settled?
“You may be contacted by members of the media and perhaps by the lawyers—”
It was over? Just like that? What the fuck?
“—and you retain your First Amendment rights. You may speak to anyone about anything, but you also don’t need to. Of course, you may want to return to your homes—”
Go home? How could this be happening?
“—but we have arranged for you to have another night in your accommodations, and the deputies will ensure that you will not be harassed. I strongly advise that you take this time to organize your thoughts. So now you are indeed excused for the final time.”
“No.” Delia had stood up. “Why were we sequestered?”
But the judge was already leaving; the high padded back of his chair swiveled toward them, the back of his black robe a blank slab as it disappeared from the courtroom.
Sally gestured for them all to return to the jury room.
Everyone was frozen. Was this a joke?
“Please,” Sally said. “Please come.”
Obediently they stood. This was insane.
The front row always went first. Those of them in the second row waited.
“What does it mean?” Yvette was asking Caitlin.
“That they settled?”
“Probably that they pleaded guilty to some of the charges and got less of a sentence than if we had found them guilty of everything.”
“I guess I had heard of that,” Yvette said, “but doesn’t that usually happen before the trial?”
“That would have been nice,” Caitlin answered.
Seth agreed with her. It sure as hell would have been nice.
He had had to give up that New Zealand shot, and it was possible that it would never again make sense for Street Boards to finance such a big-deal part. And people like Caitlin and Dave not being able to earn? And April? She had had exactly one morning of fun in planning her wedding. Back in June Seth would have thought that that was nothing. Now he knew what a big deal it was, that some brides and their moms enjoyed the planning as much as the wedding itself.
In the jury room, Sally said that of course that any of them could walk out immediately, but the sidewalks were clogged with reporters, and they would have to return to the inn eventually to pick up their belongings. She advised them to go back in the court’s van. It would be here soon. Then she handed Marcus the sealed bag with his computer, phone, and watch. Everyone else had had family to pick up their things.
“Can you go online?” someone asked Marcus. “And find out what’s going on?”
He nodded and switched on his computer. “It will take a while to boot up.”
“What about our notebooks?” Caitlin asked Sally. “Can we get those back?”
Sally shook her head. “They are being shredded right now.”
“Shredded?” Caitlin sounded a little sick.
No wonder. Her notebook had been her companion throughout all this. She had developed that glossary that might have gotten them through deliberations; she had been designing a font, and once she had realized that she could lip-read, she had kept her eyes down during all the sidebars, drawing these super-elaborate designs. Of course she would want that back.
But why should anything good come out of this mess? He was beyond disgusted. Why had he even tried? They should have let everything fall apart at first. It would have saved weeks.
The Fourth Summer Page 19
