Say Nothing

by Brad Parks

  “Let me just rewind it,” Miss Suzanne said.

  She clicked several times. The clock in the upper right corner of the screen started scrolling quickly backward. Morning gave way to night, then to yesterday’s twilight, then to an increasingly sunny afternoon.

  Soon a succession of cars and trucks, all of them moving backward, flitted across the screen. I wasn’t seeing anything of note, but Alison said, “Right there.”

  “Okay,” Miss Suzanne said.

  She set the video going forward, at regular speed. The clock in the upper right corner read 15:55.06—military time for a few minutes before four o’clock. For the next seventy-two seconds, nothing happened. Then, at 15:56.18, a gray Honda Odyssey minivan glided into the left side of the frame and came to a stop.

  We own a gray Honda Odyssey minivan. We bought it secondhand a few years back so Justina could use it to pick up the kids.

  I couldn’t say whether this gray Honda Odyssey was our gray Honda Odyssey. The make and model appeared to be identical. You couldn’t see the license plate—only the right side of the car appeared on the screen. But I did recognize a Middle Peninsula Montessori School window decal on the right side of the back window, in the exact spot where we had ours.

  This was either our car—stolen from our driveway and then returned, perhaps?—or a painstaking reproduction of it.

  The driver was wearing sunglasses and a pink hat with a blond ponytail pulled through it. She stared straight ahead. It certainly could have been Alison. It also could have not been Alison. The footage was too grainy to tell.

  At 15:57.13, Miss Pam appeared. The side door to the minivan slid open.

  I had to stifle a gasp as my children, my two beautiful children, came bounding out. First Sam, then Emma. I fought the desire to tell Suzanne to pause it just so I could stare at them.

  But I stayed quiet as I watched the minivan roll off screen. I looked at the time stamp. It said 15:59.45.

  That was all the time it took to rip our lives apart. Two minutes and thirty-two seconds.

  “Would you like to see it again?” Miss Suzanne asked.

  Alison had lifted her hand to her mouth at some point during the viewing. She brought it down, straightened herself, and tried to retake control.

  “No, that’s okay,” she said. “We’ve taken enough of your time.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Miss Suzanne said, perhaps even more confused than before.

  “The children won’t be coming to school today,” Alison said.

  “Oh?” said Miss Suzanne.

  “They both came down with a fever last night,” Alison said, then added: “My mother is watching them today.”

  “Well, I hope they feel better,” Suzanne said.

  “Yes, thank you. We’ll see ourselves out.”

  We escaped to the parking lot. Alison waited that long before the sob she had been muffling crept out. I walked toward her, to put my arm around her. She glared at me.

  “Keep walking,” she said between gritted teeth. “Don’t make a scene.”

  She had kept her back to the office the whole time. If Miss Suzanne was watching us out the window, she wouldn’t have necessarily seen anything.

  I’m not sure it mattered. We had just given a performance that could be carried off only by two people who had lost their minds.

  EIGHT

  Alison called me shortly after we pulled out of the parking lot.

  “It wasn’t me,” she said. “I didn’t pick up the kids.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I can’t believe the kids would just hop into the car with a stranger. Did they really not notice?”

  “It was just another day on the pickup line,” I reasoned. “They didn’t have cause to think anything was out of place.”

  “It’s just wild. I”—she interrupted herself with a strong exhale—“I don’t know if I can hold it together.”

  I didn’t know if I could either. But this didn’t seem like the right moment to admit that. I think it’s an unwritten rule of parenting that only one of you gets to freak out at a time.

  “Can you imagine how insane we must have looked? ‘Hey, who picked up our kids? We’re such bad parents, we don’t even know.’ ‘Oh, actually, you did, you lunatic.’”

  “Yeah. We must have looked pretty nuts,” I said. “But, I have to be honest, I think we have bigger things to worry about.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “I know.”

  I had just made the left turn to travel south on Route 17, a four-lane decorated by the gaudy ornamentation of American commerce—fast-food joints and chain hotels, strip malls and banks, auto-repair shops and gas stations, all set on an endless loop.

  “Okay, I guess I’ll let you go,” she said. “You’ll let me know as soon as you have them, right?”

  “Of course. Just sit tight. This will be over soon.”

  We ended the call. I had just crossed over the York River on the Coleman Bridge and merged onto Interstate 64 when my phone rang again. I thought it would be Alison. Instead, I saw just one name on the screen: FRANKLIN.

  * * *

  For thirteen years, Senator Blake Franklin had been my boss. No, more than that. He had been my mentor, my cajoler, my cheerleader, my tormentor, my obsession. He was that rare person who could always tell me how good I was and also how much better I could be, and I would believe him, no matter what he said. As my job titles became more impressive and my responsibilities grew, so did the hours I spent in his service. I typically arrived by six A.M., seldom left before eight P.M., and told myself I was happy to do it. I was, above all, desperate to please him.

  Then came this one day five years ago, otherwise known as The Incident. Blake was holding a press conference to announce a much-heralded piece of gun legislation we were calling the Gun Rights and Responsibilities Act.

  It was, we felt, a very reasonable law, one designed to appeal to both sides of the aisle. It recognized, in very strong terms, that the Second Amendment guaranteed the individual right to gun ownership—codifying recent Supreme Court rulings on the subject, an important concession to the gun lobby. It implicitly outlawed any efforts to limit the number of guns owned by an individual, another nod to the crowd of lawful citizens who merely wanted the gunpowder-backed instrumentality to resist government tyranny. But it also greatly strengthened background checks and other commonsense measures designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, spouse abusers, and the mentally ill.

  I had worked on it like a fiend, polishing it to unassailable perfection. Various versions of the bill had been passed around Capitol Hill, and it seemed to have the broad support in both houses necessary to pass. I was proud to be standing just behind Blake as he introduced it.

  Then some nutcase—precisely the kind of person the bill was designed to prevent from owning a gun—opened fire.

  He squeezed off eight rounds before a police officer tackled him. Blake, miraculously, was not hit. Seven of the bullets bounced harmlessly off the steps of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. One buried itself in the right side of my chest.

  The doctor told me later I was extremely fortunate: The bullet struck at an angle and ricocheted off my ribs to the left, exiting out my armpit. Had it gone straight, I would have been in real trouble. Had it turned right, I would have been dead for sure.

  As it was, it carried away a chunk of flesh and any notions I might have had about immortality. It is, perhaps, a cliché to say that facing death makes you reevaluate your priorities. But it’s a cliché because it’s true. That bullet impacted me far beyond the scars it left behind.

  Certainly, it reinforced what my late father had told me about how no man ever lay on his deathbed wishing he had spent more time at work. The twins had just celebrated their first birthday and, in the harsh light of the surgical recovery room, I saw that I h
ad basically missed the whole year, losing it in a haze of fourteen-hour workdays. Sure, a bullet tearing off in a different direction might have made their lack of a father permanent. But I had been depriving them of a second parent long before that bullet arrived.

  I knew nothing would change as long as I continued in Senator Franklin’s employ. When I told Alison I was thinking about quitting—this, mind you, was before the anesthesia from surgery had even worn off—she wept with joy.

  Two days later, still in my hospital bed, I presented my handwritten letter of resignation to Senator Franklin. He was incredibly gracious about it. I’m sure guilt played a role: He knew those bullets had been intended for him. Maybe it also helped that he was Emma’s godfather. There was a higher authority telling him this was right for me and my family.

  The judgeship had actually been his idea. One of the seats in the Eastern District of Virginia, in Norfolk, had just become vacant. I was, to say the least, an atypical candidate. No one could remember a Senate staffer being appointed to a federal judgeship, and I hadn’t regularly been in a courtroom since clerking in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, when I was just out of law school. But I rode my many contacts within the Senate and a strong measure of shooting-inspired sympathy to an 88–0 confirmation.

  The twelve senators who opposed my nomination were too chicken to show up and cast their votes. Instead, they got their revenge by working behind the scenes to scuttle the bill I had nearly died for.

  Since that time, Blake and I had stayed close. The shared experience of near death had bonded us like something akin to war veterans. We were also just friends who enjoyed gabbing about policy, politics, and the gossip that was in continual orbit around the Senate.

  I thought about letting his call go to voice mail. But there was a long time in my life when ignoring Senator Franklin wasn’t an option, and ultimately old habits are hard to break.

  “Hey, Blake.”

  “Good morning, Judge,” he returned in his gentle southern drawl, an accent that had won him countless votes in the southern and western parts of the state through the years. “You in the middle of anything?”

  “Just driving. What’s up?” I said, trying to sound casual.

  “Well, my press officer just had me chatting with a reporter from The Wall Street Journal.”

  “About the campaign?” Blake was in a tight race for reelection.

  “No, son, about you,” he said. “You got some big drug case?”

  It was all I could do to keep my car on the road. The Wall Street Journal was calling about Skavron? What was I missing? What could there possibly be about Rayshaun Skavron that had attracted the attention of one of America’s most important newspapers?

  “Oh yeah?” I said warily. “What’d you tell them?”

  “Oh, the usual: that you gave out child pornography as gifts every Christmas, but that we forgave you for it because you were high on heroin most of the time.”

  This was, clearly, not the side of Senator Franklin the voters got to see. Ordinarily, I would have invented some equally ribald retort. But not now.

  “I just hope they don’t find out about all those bribes you’ve been taking, because—”

  And then he stopped himself, because I wasn’t playing along, and said, “Hey . . . you all right, buddy?”

  I felt myself well up. Blake had this way with people. It was part of his genius. He could be a relentless despot, demanding more-more-more, pushing without end until the moment he realized you were at your personal brink. Then he could flip a switch and suddenly it was like he cared about nothing more in this world than your personal well-being.

  And of course, I wanted to pour my heart out to him, like I had so many times before. My parents died within a year of each other when they were in their mid-sixties and I was in my early thirties. Blake had nursed me through that and was now as close a thing as I had to a father.

  But I reeled in the nearly overwhelming urge to share my burdens with him.

  “Yeah, yeah, sorry, I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just a little distracted by this case.”

  “Well, I could say I understand, but of course I don’t. I’m not sure I could go it alone the way you do. It’s a lot easier to make a decision when you know there are at least fifty other people to share the blame with you if you screw up.”

  “Yeah. Thanks,” I said, and then just to change the subject, I said, “Everyone in your household okay?”

  He prattled on about his wife and kids for a moment—he had two girls, both happily launched into adulthood. He steered the conversation back around to The Wall Street Journal so he could assure me he told the reporter nice things about me. He finished with, “And how’s my goddaughter doing these days?”

  I felt my breathing hitch, then forced out: “She’s great, thanks.”

  “All right,” he said before ending the call. “Send Alison and the twins my best.”

  NINE

  On the morning of a sentencing, my chambers—a suite of offices that occupy the western wing of the fourth floor of the Walter E. Hoffman United States Courthouse—have a different feel to them.

  My staff is quieter. The mood is more somber. You would understand why if you had ever been to a federal prison. They are dreadful institutions whose procedures are designed to dehumanize the people they contain. And when you look at our rates of incarceration—roughly seven times higher than those of our peer nations, higher even than the Soviet Union under Stalin—you can’t help but feel there is something wrong with a society that feels the need to lock so many of its citizens in cages.

  It’s part of my job all the same. It’s just not a part I relish. My staff knows this and usually affords me some space on mornings like this.

  So it was somewhat unusual, as I went toward our small kitchen to pour myself some coffee, that I heard Jeremy Freeland’s voice coming from his office.

  “Hey, Judge, got a second?”

  Jeremy was a handsome man in his late thirties with perfectly groomed sandy-colored hair and clear blue eyes. He ran a minimum of twenty miles a week and remained scrupulously trim. He wore fitted suits and colorful ties that perfectly matched the rest of his outfit.

  Between that, his effeminate nature, and the fact that he had never been married, I assumed Jeremy was gay, though we had never discussed it. The lawsuit that struck down Virginia’s ban on gay marriage, the Bostic case, had been decided in our courthouse. I had made it clear to Jeremy I thought the judge had rendered a very just, very eloquent decision and that it was a long-overdue triumph for civil rights in America. He responded with a dispassionate analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment.

  Jeremy’s official title was “career clerk,” but don’t be fooled by the “clerk” part. He is a lawyer, one whose experience had saved me from embarrassment countless times. Many of the rules of procedure in federal court are not codified anywhere. They’ve evolved over many decades of common practice and I had forgotten most of them when I first came out of the Senate. Jeremy was my secret weapon, making me appear far more competent than I really was.

  He had been clerking for a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judge who had finally retired, but he agreed to go back down to district court because the challenge—helping a rookie judge who clearly needed a lot of hand-holding—appealed to him. He also did research for me, kept the younger clerks in line, wrote some of my more routine decisions, and acted as a sounding board for the more complex ones. I always told Jeremy he was the best career clerk in the history of the Eastern District of Virginia, and that was not hyperbole.

  I stopped at his doorframe. His office was as carefully maintained as his personal appearance. He had plants he treated like pets. His actual pets—a pair of fish named Thurgood and Marshall, after his favorite Supreme Court justice—were like his children.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you,” he said. “I just want
ed you to know a reporter from The New York Times called this morning. I told him you had no comment, but he asked if you could talk off the record. I said no to that, too, but I at least wanted you to be aware of it.”

  First the Journal. Now the Times. What about Skavron was I missing?

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “I also got a call from a reporter named Steve Politi from a website called HedgeofReason.com. It’s some kind of investing blog run by this Politi guy. Instead of edge of reason, its hedge of reason, like hedge funds? I clicked on it and it’s . . . As far as I can tell, it’s just a lot of rumor and innuendo, sort of a National Enquirer for the finance crowd. He claims to have more than two million unique viewers a month.”

  And why did he care about Skavron?

  “Oh. Well. We’ll have no comment, of course,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  For a long moment, I rubbernecked at the security camera monitor that sits on his desk. You wouldn’t know it, but in our courthouse, which was built during the Great Depression and looked like it hadn’t been touched since then, there were actually cameras hidden everywhere. For the judges, that meant two or three angles of the hallway outside their chambers. The idea was that if someone was asking to be buzzed in, we could look at the person first. The monitor was in Jeremy’s office because my judicial assistant, Joan Smith, hated having it on her desk.

  At this moment—like most moments—the hallway was empty. But I stared at it. My head felt pretty empty too.

  * * *

  After I mumbled my thanks to Jeremy and got my coffee, I returned to my office and tried to do what I’d normally do: Go through the case one more time, check and recheck my gut about the rectitude of the punishment I was about to mete out.

  But on this morning, I couldn’t get myself to concentrate. I kept staring out the window at the gap-toothed skyline of downtown Norfolk, which is what I often did when I wanted to ponder something. Except all I could think about was the kids.