Say Nothing

by Brad Parks

  That’s when I noticed another bird feeder was gone.

  SIXTEEN

  Somehow, I slept that night. My body had finally reached the point where it gave me no choice in the matter.

  By the time my eyes opened, Alison had already left the bed. From downstairs, I could smell breakfast. Coffee. Bacon. Pancakes on a Friday, two full days before Pancake Day.

  Summoning the will to drag my still-exhausted, aching self out of bed, I shuffled over to the window. We had an extra-wide windowsill, which Alison had turned into a cozy little cubby. She decorated it with pillows that invited you to take a load off and watch the river go by. The York is more than a mile wide where we live, on the banks of the north shore, just up from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The south shore is visible, though pleasantly indistinct. It was ordinarily a view I loved.

  Now it just seemed obscene. So did the sun, which shined down on us from a cloudless blue sky. Nothing should have been allowed to be so beautiful on a day when so much else was wrong.

  I pulled myself away and went into the bathroom. I showered. Slowly. I shaved. Mechanically. I dressed. Haltingly. All I really wanted to do was ball up in the fetal position. I was battling inertia the whole way.

  Day three of a crisis is a strange time. Day one you’re in total shock. Day two is an extended triage session. By day three, your world may be shattered, but you’re getting the first inkling that it’s still spinning, whether you want it to or not.

  Alison had, as usual, reached that realization first. When I got down to the kitchen, she was bustling around, already cleaning up the last of the dishes.

  “I saved some for you,” she said, nodding toward the stovetop, where a tinfoil-draped shape awaited me.

  “Thanks,” I said, not making a move toward it.

  “Eat it,” she ordered. “You need the energy.”

  She looked up at me, forced a smile from under her dark-smudged eyes. Her drive astonished me. While I was wallowing, she was being the strong one. For me. For Sam. For Emma.

  She always was the strong one, of course. When you got right down to it, stripping away all the outer layers of bluster and faux fortitude, I felt like I was made of insubstantial things, all fluffernutter, white bread, and gummy bears. She, meanwhile, was one hundred percent steel-cut oats.

  I still remember the moment I first laid eyes on her. We were both sophomores. She was striding along in front of the student center, all youthful confidence, with her great shoulders thrust back, her long blond hair flowing behind her. There was an athletic elegance to how she moved, and the sun was setting behind her, catching her in just the perfect light. It was as if the entire solar system was blessing our meeting. The very simple thought that passed through my head was: Wow, who’s that?

  In the most uncharacteristically bold act of my life, I walked right up to her and asked her what she was doing that night. I couldn’t go another second without her being in my life.

  In that moment, I might have told you I already appreciated how beautiful she was. In truth, I had yet to see even the slightest fraction of her real radiance. Sometimes I marvel that the twenty-year-old me—an otherwise imbecilic college student who understood so little of the world—ever had the good sense to fall in love with such a remarkable woman.

  “You’re really amazing, you know that?” I said as she loaded the dishwasher.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, not stopping for the compliment.

  “No, really,” I said.

  I was trying to say more, to express how grateful I was for her, to say how astonishing I found her toughness, to tell her how much I admired her selflessness. I wanted to explain I was thinking of the entirety of our relationship and all that we had experienced together, from the harried days of our early careers, to the stolen weekends of sex and movies before we had kids, to some of those incredibly long days when the twins were babies and we thought we’d never survive; and now, to this. Somehow, I couldn’t find a way to put all that in context, or to unsnarl the traffic jam of ideas in my head. And, for her part, Alison wasn’t even glancing up from her work.

  “I’m going to check in on Sam,” I said. “Then I’ll come back and eat.”

  “Uh-huh,” she murmured as I left the kitchen.

  Some portion of my sleepless night had been spent thinking about how our boy was coping. I wondered what he had done for a morning routine without Emma. Had he waited for her to call out before realizing it wasn’t going to happen?

  I found him in the family room, staging an elaborate race scene with some of his cars, making engine noises and providing play-by-play of all the action. Emmabear was perched on the arm of the couch, taking it all in.

  “How you doing, buddy?” I asked.

  “Good,” he said.

  “You sleep okay?” I asked, because I knew sleep troubles were a leading indicator of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “Yeah,” was all he said.

  Like his mother, he didn’t look up at me. I watched him play for a little while. He seemed content enough.

  “Love you, pal.”

  “You too, Dad.”

  Deciding that was as good as I was going to get, I returned to the kitchen, grabbed the plate Alison made for me, and sat down.

  “I already called work,” Alison said as she wiped down the counter. “Someone needs to stay with Sam and it obviously can’t be you. I told them I’m taking an extended leave of absence. It’s not fair to just keep calling in sick. They need to be able to make plans without me.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And I called school and told them the twins are still sick. That will at least hold us through the weekend. On Monday I’ll call and say we’ve decided to homeschool them. It’s the only thing I can think of that won’t arouse too much suspicion. We can’t exactly send Sam to school by himself.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Also, I went online and found a lab in Williamsburg that will do DNA and fingerprint testing for us. If we pay extra, they’ll put a rush on it and we’ll have our results in three weeks. I’m going to put some of Justina’s things in there so they can be tested against the stuff from that box—just the envelope and other things that wouldn’t give a lab person a hint about what’s going on. Maybe it’s a waste of time, but it makes me feel like I’m doing something.”

  She smiled weakly at me. That’s when I saw just how thin she was stretching herself. This whole thing—getting out of bed, making breakfast, researching DNA testing, moving forward even as this tornado hovered over us—was not the product of some indefatigable reserve of resilience she possessed naturally. It was a huge effort.

  “What time did you get up this morning, anyway?” I asked.

  “Oh, I barely slept,” she said, brushing it off. “Those child PTSD websites I was looking at said it’s important to resume normal activity as much as possible. They actually said we should send him back to school but in lieu of that we should help him seek pleasurable activities—trips to fun places, bike rides, things like that. I thought I’d take him to the Living Museum today.”

  The Virginia Living Museum, in nearby Newport News, had just enough critters to keep kids entertained, but not so many that you were exhausted by the time you got through it.

  “Oh, that’s a good idea.”

  “Karen and Jenny are coming with us.”

  “Great,” I said.

  I was thankful that Jennifer worked strange shifts at the hospital and Karen was a stay-at-home mom. It would be good for Alison to have adult company. I was sure Sam would enjoy being lavished with attention from his mother and aunts too.

  “I’m going to get ready,” she said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  She walked over, bussed my cheek, and disappeared upstairs.

  * * *

  As I tucked into the pancakes, I busied myself with m
y phone, scanning the e-mails that had come in since my sudden disappearance the previous afternoon.

  After scrolling past a couple that could wait, there was one that practically leapt off the screen: from John E. Byers—“Jeb” to those who felt they could address him familiarly. Jeb Byers was the chief judge of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. Federal judges don’t really have bosses, of course. But if we did, he would be my boss’s boss.

  As best as I understood, Byers came from one of those old Virginia families where most everyone who was not an evident success—a distinguished public servant, a wealthy businessperson, a boarding school headmaster—at least had the good breeding to revert to quiet shame and alcoholism.

  We had met a handful of times. He almost never e-mailed me.

  This one had the subject line “Conversation.” I had a strong sense of foreboding even before I opened it.

  “Judge Sampson,” it read. “We need to have a conversation about US vs. Skavron, today if at all possible. Would you please suggest a few times when we might talk?” It was signed, “JEB.”

  I felt a spurt of anxiety. Judges, as a rule, did not initiate conversations about each other’s opinions. Even the ludicrous ones. Yes, Judge Byers would likely head the three-judge panel that would reverse my decision in United States vs. Skavron. But he would do so without consulting my thoughts on the matter.

  There was only one reason I could think he wanted to have this talk, and it was contained in the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980. Under that law, which regulated the care and handling of malfunctioning judges, all accusations of judicial misconduct were channeled through the chief judge of the circuit.

  Most complaints came from convicted felons whose inventive imaginations were surpassed only by the time they had available to make spurious allegations, or from indignant lawyers whose chief grievance was that the judge in question hadn’t ruled in their favor. The chief judge typically dispatched those so quickly they might as well never have existed.

  But if the chief judge felt there was some smoke from a complaint, with the possibility of fire beneath it, he began an inquiry. He usually started with a phone call to the accused judge, who would be given a chance to explain himself.

  It was a codified politeness as much as anything, a nod to the venerated tradition of judges policing themselves.

  It was also the first step in the impeachment process.

  SEVENTEEN

  Throughout my forty-minute commute to Norfolk, I rehearsed various versions of the conversation I would need to have with Byers.

  None of them went particularly well. By all rights, Skavron should have just now been settling in for a long stay with the US Bureau of Prisons. There was no question about his culpability, which had been settled the moment he pleaded guilty. There was, likewise, no dispute about the weight of the drugs he was found with, or his extensive criminal history, or any of the factors that might have impacted his punishment. Even his own attorney recommended a twelve-year sentence.

  Every time I imagined Byers asking me my rationale for cutting loose such a scourge, I then had to imagine myself babbling and disseminating. Which would only lead Byers toward the conclusion I was sure he, and others, were already considering:

  That I had been bought off.

  What other possible explanation was there when a judge let an admitted drug dealer walk free?

  Well, in this case, there was one other. The truth. But I couldn’t tell him that. Not without kick-starting a potentially disastrous chain of events.

  I was no closer to figuring out how I’d handle the mess when I arrived at the Walter E. Hoffman United States Courthouse, the impressive gray limestone monument to federal government hegemony where I work each day. As I entered the building, I made a supreme effort at projecting normalcy, trying to remember what I used to look like back when no one thought I was crooked and when I could take for granted that my daughter would be coming home at night.

  As the stars of the small galaxy that is a federal courthouse, we judges are under constant—though strangely oblique—scrutiny. Most seasoned courthouse employees have absorbed enough legal education to be the equivalent of roughly two years of law school, so opinions about opinions are legion. When a judge makes a controversial decision, it sets the entire place abuzz.

  The thing is, no one dares breathe a word to the judge directly. It’s all sideways glances and whispers once they think you’re out of earshot. People will talk about you, not at you, making the federal judiciary something like an eighth-grade lunchroom.

  I hoped some of the gossips would give me the benefit of the doubt. I always tried to be affable with everyone at the courthouse. There are certainly judges who don’t bother with such niceties. They make like divas, acting as if their jobs matter more than anyone else’s, wearing their superciliousness with the same gravitas as they wear their robes.

  Which I never fully understood. To me, all of us there—whether we were sweeping the floors or rendering the verdicts—were, on some level, merely fellow laborers at the justice factory. Each of us was needed to keep the assembly line running properly.

  More to the point, we’re all equal in the eyes of the law. And it has always struck me that a judge ought to act accordingly.

  That meant smiling at folks. And calling them by name. And knowing as much about them as they did about me.

  I can tell you, for example, that Ben Gardner, the amiable CSO who has stood guard at the employee entrance for roughly half a millennium, is an inveterate fan of University of Alabama football. I know that Hector Ruiz, the excitable janitor who cleans our floor, bursts with pride because his daughter is now in law school. I know that Tikka Jones, who works in the main clerk’s office, enjoys when people compliment her hair, because she spends hours in the chair at her local salon, having it braided or having extensions put in.

  Would any of those friendships, however superficial they were, matter now? Would they stick up for me? Or would they turn on me like everyone else?

  It made merely walking through the doors and falsifying good cheer feel like an enormous undertaking. After my first “good morning” to Ben Gardner, I almost turned around and went home. It felt like I was betraying Emma, putting up this smiling front, making small talk about Alabama’s defensive secondary. Somehow, I maintained the facade all the way through security, up the elevators, and to the door of my chambers.

  My immediate staff consists of just five people. Their jobs are all intricately tethered. It results in a certain groupthink, to the point where the staff’s mood tends to resemble a school of herring: multiple organisms that act as one.

  Normally, they moved in easy concert. I was sure today they would be on edge. Whereas I was spared the direct frontal assault from the rumor mill, they would be a locus for all the incredulous questions and petty gossip the courthouse could churn out.

  As I pushed through the door, I took a deep breath and put on my bravest face. They needed to see me looking confident and unbothered by all the spurious talk.

  “Good morning, everyone, good morning.” Nod and smile. “I’m fine, thank you, and you?” Smile and nod. “Give me twenty minutes; I just have to make one phone call.”

  I made it through the door to my office, which I closed behind me. I set down my briefcase, hung up my jacket, and took my phone off the hook to make it seem like I was on a call.

  Then I collapsed in my chair and buried my face in my hands.

  When I brought my head back up, my gaze fell on a framed picture we had taken of the twins at Busch Gardens two years earlier. They were four at that point, having recently mastered a host of new tricks—dressing themselves, peeing without being told, speaking in full and surprising sentences, etcetera—thus freeing their parents to enjoy them as the tiny human beings they were. It was glorious weather. Everyone was in a good mood. We reveled in train rides
and ice cream and the Land of the Dragons kids’ area.

  The photo on my desk came from the merry-go-round. I caught them as they were whirling around from the far side. The angle was just right, with Sam barely ahead of Emma, exactly as it had been on the day of their birth. Their faces wore the pure, unadulterated joy of children having the time of their little lives. Their tiny hands gripped the poles; their spindly arms bravely battled the centrifugal forces.

  A few of Emma’s curly locks were flung out to the side as if they, too, had been caught in the exuberance. Sam was all wild-eyed, his mouth open in a yell.

  It was when I studied Emma more closely that I noticed something I had never quite caught before. She wasn’t looking off into the distance like Sam was. She was looking straight at Sammy. Her fun was based on the fact that he was having fun. That’s how twins often go, of course: When one laughs, the other can’t help but join in.

  Except it wasn’t that way now.

  Now she was trapped in a tiny bedroom, shaved bald, her brother nowhere to be found. She had no one to laugh with, no one whose presence could reassure her. She was being held captive by people who did not value her life as anything other than a high-stakes bargaining chip.

  She was utterly alone.

  I turned away from the photo, then put it in a drawer, unable to bear looking at it any longer. After a trip to my private bathroom to splash cold water on my face, I returned to the office and put the phone back on the hook. It was time to face the world again, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do.

  Then I realized I had received a text message. It was from the same 900 number that had texted me the day before. And it said:

  Interesting article in the Journal today, don’t you think?