by Jodi Picoult
From my vantage point on the bottom bunk, I look up and see the steel tray holding the upper mattress. I look at the tack welds and wonder how much weight they can support.
“Sticks, he one tough cracker, man. He thinks he own this pod.” Concise shakes his head. “We all wonderin’ who the hell you are.”
I close my eyes and think of all the people I have been in my lifetime: a boy who fell in love with a broken girl a thousand years ago; a father holding a newborn and thinking that nothing could ever make him let her go; a man starving for one more moment with his little girl; a fugitive on the run; a liar; a cheat; a felon. Maybe the habit that is always waiting to jump me on the other side of the fence is revival. Maybe I will do absolutely anything to wipe the slate clean, to start over.
“Call me Andrew,” I say.
Eric
The law offices of Hamilton, Hamilton and Hamilton-Thorpe are located in downtown Phoenix, in a mirrored building that scares the hell out of me when I walk up close and see that ghost of myself coming forward. Chris, the second Hamilton in the name lineup, went to law school with me in Vermont, knowing all along he had a nice cushy job waiting at his father’s firm (the first Hamilton in the name lineup). The newest partner (the hyphenated one) is Chris’s little sister, recently graduated from Harvard Law.
In order to try a case pro hac vice in a different state, you need a sponsoring local attorney. Actually, it’s similar to AA, where someone older and wiser mentors you in the hopes that you do nothing to embarrass yourself. Chris is a former diver with the face of a choirboy who used to be able to charm professors into extensions without breaking a sweat. When I called and asked him to be my Arizona counsel, he didn’t even hesitate before agreeing.
“I ought to tell you about the case,” I had said.
“Who cares?” Chris answered. “It’s an excuse to go out and have a few beers.”
I didn’t tell him I no longer do that.
He was in court yesterday when I arrived at the law office in a mad rush, trying to contact the New Hampshire Bar Association. His sister, Serena, graciously ceded me the conference room at Hamilton, Hamilton and Hamilton-Thorpe; a vast expanse of paneled wood and barrister bookcases and brass-studded leather chairs.
No one is in the office this morning when I let myself in with my newly minted key, but then, it is only 6:45 A.M. After yesterday’s debacle with my nonexistent Bar card, I am determined to read up on Arizona case law before visiting hours begin at the jail.
I find myself staring at the legalese, all those blocks of type and tiny letters morphing into one another, until all I can make out on a page is the shape of a man holding out his hand, and a little girl reaching to grab it.
* * *
I was ten years old, and in serious training for the CIA. I had a walkie-talkie, a black-stocking balaclava, a flashlight, and a cheat sheet for Morse code. To practice, I was going to spy on my mother in the living room, although I was supposed to still be outside catching June bugs in old Jif peanut butter jars.
She was on the phone when I crept in on cat feet and flattened myself behind the couch with my tape recorder. “He’s a son of a bitch is all,” she said. “Well, you know what? She can have him. She can have his pyramid schemes and his big promises and all his Casanova bullshit.”
I turned on the tape recorder and realized too late that I had hit play, and, worse, that the Halloween screams of a dozen humpback whales were filling the room. My mother jumped and peeked over the back of the couch, narrowing her eyes in a death laser. “Andrea, I have to call you back,” she said.
A good CIA agent would unspool the tape and eat the evidence, I thought. A good CIA agent would pull a cyanide pill from the folds of his suit and go down as a hero for his mission.
My mother yanked me up by the ear. “You liar,” she said, those long vowels a boozy breeze across my face. “You’re just like him.” She slapped me so hard across the head that I actually saw stars, and for a minute I was amazed that this could actually happen, that it wasn’t just something you saw in a cartoon. I cowered, hating myself for that, hating her.
And then, just as suddenly, she was behind the couch with me, her octopus hands smoothing my hair and kissing my face and rocking me. “Baby, I didn’t mean to,” she said. “You forgive me, don’t you? You know I’d never hurt you. You and me, we’re in this together, aren’t we?”
I stood up and backed away from her. “I got invited next door for dinner,” I said, and a red flare went off in my head. I was a liar.
“Well, you go then,” she replied, and she smiled her loose smile, the one that she used when she was embarrassed—not to be confused with the bright smile, the one she wore when she was completely lit; or the fake smile, the one that made my stomach feel like a cello strung too tight.
Outside, the neighborhood was painted like a hand-colored photo; nearly too dark to make out the reds of the peeling shutters or the snowflake blue of the hydrangeas. I headed for Delia’s house but stopped as I came around the corner. Their kitchen window burned buttery as a candle, and inside I could see Delia and her father eating dinner. Fried chicken. Her father had both of the drumsticks in his hands, and he was making them do a can-can across the platter toward Delia.
I sat down on the lawn. I didn’t really want to interrupt them, I realized. I just wanted to know that somewhere, in a household, this was going on.
* * *
“Eric, man, if you keep working this hard you’re going to get me disinherited,” Chris laughs, and I jump awake with a start, my heart leaping like a fish pulled through six leagues of sea. I smooth my rumpled tie and rub my hand down my face. There is a crease in my cheek, the result of lying on top of an open book.
Chris does not look much different from how he did years ago in law school: the same relaxed posture; the same sandy blond hair; the same comfortable expression of a man who knows the world will always go his way. “So, welcome to the family business,” he says. “My sister said she got you settled yesterday. Sorry I couldn’t be the one.”
“Serena was great,” I reply, clearing my throat. “And the office is terrific.”
Chris sits down across the table from me. “Must be a pain in the ass having to become fluent overnight in Arizona law.”
“I didn’t think you had law down here. Isn’t it still ten paces, turn, and draw your weapon?”
Chris laughs. “Only half the time. You’re forgetting the posses.” He takes a sip of coffee; just the smell of it makes me salivate. But I gave up caffeine with booze; the blood rush was too similar and I didn’t want to tempt my body with the feel of a high. These days, I will not even take an aspirin for a garden-variety headache.
Chris lifts his mug toward me. “There’s more if you want some. Just brewed.”
“Thanks, but I don’t drink coffee.”
“That’s inhuman, you know.” He sits forward, his elbows on the table. “So I suppose you should tell me about this case, if I have to be second chair. Must be a pretty important client, if he convinced you to haul your butt to Arizona to fight some charge.”
“He is pretty important,” I answer. “He’s my fiancée’s father. He got indicted for kidnapping her during a custody visit in 1977.”
Chris’s eyes widen. “I am never going to complain about my in-laws again.”
I leave out the part about how Andrew as good as confessed to me at the Wexton PD. How he expressed the desire to plead guilty, and how I swore to Delia that I wouldn’t let that happen. To try a case in another state, your professional conduct must be impeccable; I have already failed on two counts. “Delia asked me to represent him. I haven’t even seen Andrew since he was extradited. I spent the whole afternoon yesterday trying to convince the staff at the Madison Street Jail that I’m really a lawyer, and don’t just play one on TV.”
The secretary sticks her head into the conference room. “Oh, good, Mr. Talcott, you’re awake,” she says, and a flush of embarrassment spreads over
my collar. “Your fiancée wants you to call her immediately, something about your daughter being sick.”
“Sophie?” I ask, but I am already reaching for the phone. Sick as in head cold, or sick as in bubonic plague? I dial Delia’s cell number, and get her voice mail. “Call me,” I say, and then I look up at Chris. “Maybe I should swing by home, make sure she’s all right . . .”
“This came for you, too,” the secretary says, and she passes me a fax.
It is a letter from the New Hampshire Bar Association, stating I am a member in good standing.
I ought to go check on Sophie, but I also need to talk to Andrew, in jail.
I have a feeling this isn’t the last time I will be asked to choose between Delia’s present life and her past.
* * *
Which came first: the addict or the drug?
You can’t have an addiction unless there’s something to crave; by the same token, a drug is nothing but a plant or a drink or a powder until someone wants it badly. The truth is, the addict and the drug came together. And therein lies the problem.
When you want something desperately, you shake with the need for it. You tell yourself you don’t need more than one sip, because it’s just the taste you crave, and once it’s on your tongue you will be able to make it last a lifetime. You dream of it at night. You see a thousand mile-high obstacles between where you stand and what you want, and you convince yourself you have the power to hurdle them. You tell yourself this even when, leaping the first block, you wind up bruised and bloodied and flattened.
I have been fooling everyone for years. Sure, I’ve given up alcohol, but that was nothing compared to my other addiction. Love is the most dangerous craving of all, if you ask me. It turns us into people we aren’t. It makes us feel like hell, and makes us walk on water. It ruins us for anything else.
I watch her doing the simplest things: brushing her hair into a ponytail, feeding the dog, tying Sophie’s shoelaces, and I want to tell her what she means to me, but I never actually say the words. After all, to acknowledge Delia as a drug, I’d have to face the fact that one day I might have to go without her, and this I can’t do.
* * *
Inside the lobby of the Madison Street Jail, a spot I became all too familiar with yesterday, are a bank of blue chairs and a wall-mounted television. Against one wall is a line of bank-teller windows, with signs posted above to separate VISITORS from ATTORNEYS ONLY. I approach that window, feeling like the first-class airline passenger bypassing the masses. The woman staffing the position remembers me from yesterday. “You’re back,” she says sourly.
I offer up my best smile. “Good morning.” I push the letter from the New Hampshire Bar Association through the slit at the bottom of the Plexiglas window. “See? I told you I was a genuine attorney.”
“Genuine attorney . . . that’s one of those whatchamacallits. You know, like jumbo shrimp and working vacation and military intelligence.”
“Oxymoron.”
“Hey, you want to call yourself names, fine with me.” She picks up a pen. “Which inmate did you want to see?”
While I wait for a detention officer to lead me into the jail, I sit in the bank of chairs and watch TV with some of the other visitors. Some have brought children who bounce on their laps like popcorn. The show currently airing is some sort of court TV—or so I think, until I read the sleeve badge of one of the bailiffs standing beside the judge’s bench: Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. At that point I realize that this must be a closed-circuit film of some arraignment process that goes on inside the jail itself. “iMira!” the lady next to me says proudly, pointing at the television monitor so that her toddler will look. “¿No es guapo tu papá?”
When my name is called, a beefy officer leads me to a metal detector, and then takes a cluster of keys from his belt to open a door that leads to an airlock about three feet square. From inside a control room, the inner door opens, admitting us into the jail.
We take an elevator up to the fourth-floor visiting area. Another detention officer holds court over a small assortment of inmates. Some speak to their attorneys in private rooms. A long central section features dozens of individual noncontact-visit booths. One inmate is chained to a stool, holding a phone in his hand. On the other side of a glass wall, a woman is crying.
“You can wait here,” the detention officer says. “We’ll go get your client.”
“Here” turns out to be a side room with a fluorescent light that hisses and spits like a wet cat. From this vantage point, I can’t see the inmate anymore, but I can see the woman visiting him. She has leaned forward now, and is kissing the glass.
When I was eleven, I caught Delia making out with the bathroom mirror. I asked her what she was doing. “Practicing,” she informed me, matter-of-fact. “You might want to think about it, too.”
After a while I glance at my watch. Twenty minutes have gone by; I stand up and try to locate the detention officer. He is on the other side of the visiting room, bent over the Arizona Republic’s sports page. “Excuse me,” I say. “Has anyone found my client yet? Andrew Hopkins?”
The man gives me a blank stare, but he crosses the room and picks up a phone. He speaks into it for a few moments, and then returns to me. “They thought someone came down to tell you. Your client’s already been brought next door to court.”
* * *
I call Chris Hamilton on my cell phone as I’m flying up the steps of the East Courthouse. “How fast can you be here?” I demand. As my sponsoring attorney, he has to be present in the courtroom even if my pro hac vice motion has been granted. I don’t have time to call Delia, and I know she is going to kill me for that. But then, Andrew is about to face a judge without me—a judge to whom he plans to plead guilty.
The court building is ten times larger than any court in New Hampshire. A bailiff runs a metal detector just inside the entrance; a woman holds tight to a little boy’s hand as she sets her purse on the conveyor belt. Attorneys crossing the lobby drift toward each other, making deals over cups of coffee. In the chairs, waiting, are sequestered witnesses in their itchy suits and welfare kids with coloring books and the personal recognizance returnees, their baggy pants riding low and their tooks pulled down past their eyebrows.
I try to find a clerk who can tell me on which of the nine floors, and in which of the twenty courtrooms, Andrew will be appearing, but no one seems to have that answer. So I run to the sheriff’s office inside the court, the holding pen where inmates are kept waiting until they appear. The deputy at the desk has a Doc Holliday mustache and a Buddha belly. “All’s I know,” he says, “is that if it’s an arraignment, you’re in the wrong damn courthouse.”
I am running over to the other courthouse—the Central Courthouse—when I see Chris hurrying toward the building. This one has thirteen stories with five courtrooms. One look at the line for the elevators, and I’m following him up a staircase. We reach the fifth floor, gasping. “Not Guilty Arraignments,” he explains, and we burst into Courtroom 501 together like a comic book duo come to save the day.
I wish I could say I am filled with confidence when I walk into that courtroom, but if I’m going to be honest, I don’t have a very good track record with success. It took me two attempts to pass the Bar. I started AA three times and then proceeded to once again drink myself into oblivion. I have no reason to believe that this latest challenge will be any different.
The judge is the most imposing justice I have ever seen. He easily weighs three hundred pounds, has flyaway gray hair, and fists the size of Easter hams. A placard on the bench announces him as The Honorable Caesar T. Noble. “I can’t believe you drew that judge,” Chris says under his breath. “We call him No Bull.”
The inmate sitting alone at the defense bench gets to his feet, his ankle chains jingling. Standing, his profile is visible: It is Andrew.
“Mr. Hopkins, I see you don’t have counsel present, so I’m going to ask you to enter a plea,” the judge says.
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I start running down the center aisle. There is a saying sometimes chanted at AA meetings: Fake it until you make it. I’ve done it before. I can do it again.
The judge—hell, everyone in the room—looks to me. “Excuse me,” Noble says, as I hurdle the bar and step up beside Andrew, squeezing his shoulder. “Would you please identify yourself?”
“Eric Talcott, Your Honor. I’m an attorney licensed to practice in the state of New Hampshire, but I’ve filed a motion to appear before you pro hac vice. My sponsor for the State of Arizona is Christopher Hamilton . . . and, um, I’m certified to practice in this courtroom, provided the motion has been granted.”
The judge glances down at his file, and then back up at me. “Sir, you are out of order. Not only don’t I have this alleged pro hac vice motion, but I find it extremely disrespectful that you’ve come whooping into my courtroom and interfered with my proceedings.” He narrows his gaze until it nicks at my throat. “Maybe that’s the way y’all do things in New Hampshire, but here in Arizona, we don’t.”
“Your Honor,” Chris says, smoothly stepping over the bar to stand next to me. “If you please, I’m Chris Hamilton, and I’m responsible for that pro hac vice motion. We asked the clerk’s office to bring the motion either to Your Honor or to another judge who might be in a position to sign it quickly . . . knowing as I do that Your Honor prefers, understandably, to have everything in order.”
Chris couldn’t come any closer to kissing this guy’s considerable ass.
Apparently, in Arizona, that actually works. The judge beckons to the clerk of the court. “Call over and see if there’s any kind of motion that’s been filed and granted.”
The clerk picks up the phone and mouths words that don’t carry any volume. I have never understood how they quite do that, but it’s the same in every court. When he hangs up he turns to the judge. “Your Honor, Judge Umatallo just granted the motion.”
“Mr. Talcott, this is your lucky day,” Noble says, without a trace of hospitality. “How does your client plead?”
