She couldn’t breathe. Wasn’t this what she wanted? For him to ask her to come with him?
No. She wanted him to say that she mattered, that he wasn’t running away, that he had to go to Oregon to think and he couldn’t do that without her.
Instead he had said it as if it had just occurred to him, as if he were thinking about whether or not to have a second cup of coffee.
I need to be more than that.
* * * *
“We didn’t want to start an argument with the Streets’ son-in-law,” her mother said in the car on their way home.
“Argument?” What was she talking about? “Oh, about the jurors being clueless? Well, we were.”
“Some of the columnists were saying that the lawyers were making it more confusing than it needed to be, but your dad kept saying that you would find a way.”
“That’s nice of you,” Caitlin murmured.
“I meant it,” her dad said. “Look at you, constantly figuring things out for yourself, getting your way paid to Stanford, supporting yourself on your own. I knew that you would find a way to come to a decent verdict.”
Caitlin had to blink. That was nice to hear. At least her parents thought she was worth something. “I was trying.” She explained about her glossary. “And I could tell a lot from the witnesses’ body language, which ones were being straight with us, which ones were trying to shape their story, which ones were ashamed to be there.”
“That’s my girl,” her dad said.
* * * *
Her mother knocked on her door as she was getting ready for bed.
“Your dad doesn’t like to talk about this, about how little money we had for your education. The night you signed with Stanford, he felt so guilty. So we decided then that we would make sure that you could have any kind of wedding that you wanted.”
“Wedding?” Caitlin stared at her. “Wedding?”
“You do know what a wedding is.”
“Yes, but—”
“I know Trina’s was very quiet. At first she wanted something bigger, more traditional, but even she came to understand. When it came to a big wedding, it would be your turn.”
This was insane. Why was Mom talking about a wedding? Caitlin wasn’t getting married. April was getting married. April was marrying that nice apprentice electrician she had met working in the installation office at Sears. Caitlin didn’t know any nice electricians. She only knew a snowboarder, and he had just abandoned her. She had been seduced and abandoned...although technically she had done the seducing, but not the abandoning, so not the abandoning.
“Mom. You are way ahead of yourself.” Just like with the birth control pills.
Caitlin looked at her watch as the door closed behind her mother. Her sister would still be awake.
“Did the computers get fixed?” she asked when Trina answered.
“Yes, then no, then yes again. I’m still at the office.”
“Is there anything I can do to help? I could come down.”
“That’s so sweet of you.” Her sister sounded surprised. “But no...this is the biggest assignment I’ve ever had, and I want to show my boss—and myself—that I can handle it. But do you need to come here? Are Mom and Dad driving you nuts?”
“Not Dad. But Mom has started talking about my wedding.”
“And that surprises you? Don’t forget that she grew up in North Carolina.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Oh, honey chile.” Trina faked a Southern drawl. “The navy might have taken the girl out of the South, but ain’t no one can take the South out of the girl. “ Then she returned to her normal voice. “You’re going to get a big-ass Southern wedding with ten bridesmaids and a cake the size of Tennessee.”
“That’s nuts. Why would I want that? Even if I had someone, which I don’t.”
“What about you and Seth?”
“No. Absolutely not. I don’t know where you got that idea.”
“From Mom. Where else?”
Sweet Jesus. Her mother was thinking she would marry Seth? Well, soon enough Mom, Trina, and Southern girls everywhere would know the truth. Seth was going back to Oregon.
* * * *
Caitlin couldn’t sleep that night. A big-ass Southern wedding? She didn’t want that. She would settle for a guy who hadn’t run off, looking for snow at the height of the summer.
When she came downstairs in the morning, her parents were at the breakfast table, their heads bent close together over the newspaper. When she saw Caitlin, her mother grabbed the paper, scrambling to fold it up.
Her dad stopped her. “She’s going to see it, Sharon. You can’t protect her.”
“What is it?” Caitlin held out her hand for the paper. She didn’t need to be protected.
Through the weeks of the trial the local paper had criticized the judge, the lawyers, the defendants, the DA. The jury had always been off limits.
Not anymore. The paper hadn’t quite called the jurors bone dumb, but it did question whether they had the intelligence and education to be the vehicles for justice in such a complex case.
The lawyers chose us. Blame them.
Only four of the jurors had undergraduate degrees, the paper had learned, and five had never attended college at all. Courtroom observers reported that that some had difficulty staying awake while others seemed to be daydreaming and one was doodling in the court-supplied notebook.
Caitlin folded the paper and handed it back to her mother. “I was the doodler, but only during the sidebars.”
“Don’t you want to say that, then? Don’t you want to answer them?” her mother asked. “Should she do something, Pete?”
Apparently Caitlin’s father’s opinion about what Caitlin should do mattered as much as Caitlin’s own.
“No,” he said. “It will blow over. Answering will keep the story alive.”
* * * *
Seth’s sister sent him a text with a link to their hometown newspaper. He was stuck on the runway at the Portland airport waiting for a gate to open up, and so he clicked on the link. At any other time he might have ignored it.
It was an article about the jury. He scanned it. Well, yeah, the jurors hadn’t been qualified to render judgment on the issues...because no one had tried to get them to understand. The trial had been a complete-ass waste of time, insulting and—
No, he wasn’t going to get angry again. He was done with that.
Ben was waiting for him when he got through security. His thick auburn hair was cut shorter than Seth had ever seen it, but his expression was alert as always.
“Hey, man.” Seth punched him on the arm. “What kind of pickle did you get yourself into?” Ben’s scorched-earth criticism had been about the pressure being put on the young kids and their parents. Snowboarding was becoming like gymnastics and figure skating where the coaches needed massive numbers of parents writing checks, unknowingly sacrificing their kids for the sake of the few who would succeed.
“You know I’ve thought all that for a long time,” Ben answered. “This time I said it. But, listen, Nate’s out in the van. This latest injury is a game changer for him. He barely escaped some serious spine damage. Another fall like that, and he’s paralyzed.”
“Oh, man...that’s just...I don’t even know what to say. It sucks so bad.”
“Yes, but a part of him has got to be a little relieved.”
“Relieved?” That was nuts. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s not all creative like you or super technical like me. All he can do is go higher and bigger, and he’s sick at the thought of pushing that envelope again and again. He’s ready to be done with the insane stuff.”
Seth winced. He didn’t like hearing that.
Even with only the van’s overhead light switching on, Seth could see
that Nate was wearing some kind of body brace under his coat. The leg seam of his jeans had been ripped open because he had a hard plaster cast from his foot up beyond his knee. A pair of crutches was thrust over the console between the two front seats.
It took about an hour to get from Portland to Mt. Hood. Seth assumed that he would be glad to be home, but he was immediately bugged by the casual mess in the chalet he shared with these two guys. Everyone on the jury had been so considerate at the inn, never leaving empty coffee cups or Coke cans lying around, always putting their games and DVDs away.
The video queued up on the TV was about soccer. That was strange. “Are we trying a new sport?” he asked.
“It’s a video about coaching girls,” Nate said. “My mother and sister are trying to get us to do more for them.”
“I’m game,” Seth said, but as he was speaking, Ben left the room. He looked at Nate questioningly.
“Yeah.” Nate picked up the remote. “None of the big training programs want anything to do with him right now.”
That was a shame. Ben would have made a great coach. He could see so much and explain it all so well. They’d all assumed that he would eventually end up doing it full-time someday. He might have just screwed that up for himself.
It was like with Colleen. Whenever Ben got close to something good, he pulled out the grenades.
Seth settled down with Nate to watch the video. It focused on how critical young girls were of themselves. He thought about teaching Caitlin to skateboard. She had been supercritical of herself, but she had never doubted herself as these girls did. She had never given up.
Why hadn’t she come to Oregon with him?
Because maybe, you asshole, for the first time in her life, she’s quitting on something. You.
“What do you do when you mess up with a girl?” he suddenly asked Nate.
“Me? I run. I hide.”
“I’ve done that. I’m doing it right now. What else?”
“Beats me. Send flowers. Women are supposed to like flowers.”
“She’d take that as a kiss-off.”
Nate pushed the Pause button on the remote. “I take it we are talking about someone specific. Is she the new Colleen?”
“I don’t know...but I certainly messed things up as badly as Ben.”
* * * *
Caitlin’s parents didn’t try to hide the Sunday paper from her. After labeling the jurors stupid on Saturday, the Sunday paper declared that they were self-indulgent crybabies.
They hadn’t been willing to share rooms at the Best Western. They had demanded exercise facilities, more entertainment, and better food to the extent that the good, hardworking taxpayers of North Carolina had to pay to have them moved to a place of sybaritic elegance.
Accompanying the article were color photographs of the Wildflower Inn, showing the beautiful bedrooms, the luxurious bathrooms, and the comfortable common spaces. This was what the long-suffering taxpayers of North Carolina had coughed up their pennies for in hopes of keeping these twelve spoiled brats doing their civic duty.
There was nothing about the steeply discounted rate offered because the inn would have been vacant otherwise, nothing about how the jurors had done most of the housekeeping and had spent their weekends painting and sanding.
Reading this was painful. Caitlin wanted to call the newspaper and protest, saying that everything was slanted. But what good would that do? Whatever she said would get twisted.
She needed to talk to someone who would understand. Stephanie had gathered all the jurors’ contact information. There had been copies next to the coffee that last morning. Had Caitlin picked up a copy? She couldn’t remember. She checked the side pocket of her suitcase. Yes, she had.
Joan was an early riser, but wouldn’t have left for church yet. Caitlin would call her.
“Bless your heart, honey lamb,” Joan exclaimed. “Isn’t it awful what they are saying about us?”
It was good to commiserate and find out what people were up to. Apparently Delia was having trouble getting back into the routine of fixing three meals a day. “Her family can’t believe it, but she is telling them that they can sue her.”
“That’s a jury I’d be happy to be on. What about Yvette?’
Yvette had ended up spending Friday night in the hospital. “Say what you want about that chicken place, but they do have decent health insurance.”
Then on Saturday morning Joan, Keith, and Keith’s wife had sat down with Yvette’s sister for a “come to Jesus” talk. If Yvette couldn’t get her bedroom back, she would be moving in with Keith or Joan and would have to pay rent to them, not to the sister. “We wouldn’t have actually charged her anything, but we wouldn’t have let her pay her sister.”
Yvette’s sister had thrown out her deadbeat boyfriend and had given Yvette her old room. Yvette still felt that she had to pay half the rent and half the groceries even though the grocery bill included the little kids’ diapers, which were apparently a bigger expense than Caitlin had realized.
* * * *
Monday’s article was about the food, how the jurors’ meals had been prepared by a private chef. The fact that this chef had also been one of the jurors was buried in the middle of the article.
Many of their meals had been vegetarian, but whenever Marcus had extra in his budget, he had prepared shrimp or good cuts of beef. Of course the paper made it sound as if that had been their nightly fare without ever noting that Marcus’s cooking had actually saved the good, clean-living, overburdened taxpayers of North Carolina some money.
Caitlin was disgusted. What was wrong with this town? This was supposed to be the beautiful, wild High County. But the court system was about politics, not justice, and the newspaper was going to slant every fact to make people look bad. How could she consider living here?
Because maybe she could help fix it. There wasn’t much she could do about San Francisco, how expensive it was, what a nightmare traffic and parking were. But here she could work to make sure that a trial like theirs never happened again.
That afternoon she borrowed her mother’s car and drove to the law office of Deborah Cornerstone, the woman running for district attorney. The meager campaign staff was thrilled to have a young volunteer, someone who understood social media platforms and could design graphics. And then when they found out that she had been a juror—
“Is there any chance you could get Deborah an endorsement from Seth Street?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I thought you said those notebooks had been destroyed.”
It was Tuesday morning, and Caitlin’s parents had gotten to the newspaper first.
“That’s what we were told. What is it this time?”
The paper had printed facsimiles of pages from two of the supposedly shredded notebooks. No names were mentioned, but Caitlin could tell that one was Yvette’s and the other one hers. Because of where they sat in the jury box, their notebooks would have been at the bottom of the stack.
Each day Yvette would carefully write down the date and then nothing else. The next day she would do the same thing. Each notebook page was line after line of dates. Caitlin had seen the notebook during court, and that’s what was reproduced now.
Don’t criticize her. Caitlin felt defensive. She is a sweet, hardworking, ill-educated, spineless girl who wasn’t up to this. Criticize the people who seated her.
Caitlin’s notebook could have been interesting to courtroom observers. The glossary with all its deletions and insertions would have shown how hard she was trying to understand the financial terminology. Her daily notes included her impressions of the witnesses, noting what their body language was revealing about their testimony.
But those weren’t the pages the newspaper bothered with. Instead, it printed pages of the elaborate doodles she had done during sidebars once she had discovered that sh
e could lip-read. The pages made it look as if she never paid attention, as if she sat in court all day drawing pictures.
Not at all. This was what she had done to keep the trial going. I cared more about that than any of you.
* * * *
His sister continued to send Seth the links to articles about the jury. He opened them, but then would have to stop reading. Getting his form back was enough of a challenge that he couldn’t let himself be distracted.
Tuesday he decided he wouldn’t open the links at all. Then in the middle of the afternoon the coaches out on the slopes told him that he had to quit for the day. He was getting tired.
How frustrating was that? He knew that he had started practicing again only a few days ago, but still...
He went to the resort’s main lodge to find someone to complain to. Nate’s sister listened to him for about five minutes, but then excused herself. He couldn’t blame her.
He pulled out his phone. After glancing at the new messages, he clicked on the link in his sister’s.
Whoa, Nellie. These images were from the notebooks. One page had to be from Yvette’s notebook, and the others were from Caitlin’s, not her glossary or her daily notes, but two of her flowing full-page doodles.
He enlarged one image on his phone, but it was still too small. Back in the offices was some good equipment that he used sometimes for editing video.
On that screen the resolution was surprisingly good. The first doodle had started with a little amoeba shape in the center and then had grown outward, the shape repeating, twisting, mirroring. Some of them were inside others, growing larger and larger like a set of Russian dolls. Others spun away from the doll set. Inside each little amoeba she had put three dots near the concave curve.
She had missed a few spots. She hadn’t been doing this on the computer with a single command that would have put dots in every amoeba. She had taken her pen, lifted it, and tapped it down to make each one of those dots. He had seen her do it. She had held the notebook with her left hand, her big watch turned toward the floor, and her right hand had held the pen.
The Fourth Summer Page 22
