Gail Bowen - The Brutal Heart

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” she began, “but Ms. Jacobs said that all I have to do is speak from the heart. So that’s what I’m going to do, and I hope that what I say is what everyone else in the class would like to say to their parents. Before I start, I want to point out my mum and dad. They’re sitting over there: my dad’s the one in the wheelchair and my mum’s the one with her arm in a sling.” Someone laughed nervously. Taylor looked in the laugher’s direction. “That’s all right. You can laugh. We do.” This time the laughter was general. Zack and I exchanged glances and Taylor continued. “Anyway, I just want to say thanks to Mum and Dad for being there whenever I need you and whenever I think I don’t but I really do. Thanks for helping me with my homework and teaching me to swim and caring about my art. Thanks for driving me places and waiting for me when I’m not ready. Thanks for always making my friends feel they’re welcome in our home. Thanks for always making me feel I’m welcome in our home. I love you very much.” She raised her glass. “To my mum and dad. To all the mums and dads.”

Zack raised his glass and cleared his throat. “That’s the first time she’s ever called me Dad,” he whispered.

“First time she’s ever called me Mum,” I said.

“Guess we finally made the grade,” Zack said. We touched glasses.

“To Mum and Dad,” I said.

“To Mum and Dad,” Zack replied.

After that night, there were many good moments. Remembering a scene from an old movie he’d liked, Zack came home one night with a bottle of nail polish and an invitation to join him in the bedroom. There, for the first time but not the last, he painted my toenails. Mieka drove me to Bushwakkers for a Wakker Burger and a brew and by the end of the evening we were back to our old easy ways with each other. Angus called a lot either to talk law with Zack, explain law to me, or keep me au courant on life without Leah. She was letting her hair grow, and she was still seeing Mr. Empathy, but Angus was hopeful. The first asparagus appeared in the market and the first strawberries, and when I thought of the bounty the garden of earthly delights would produce before the frost, I felt a piercing joy. Peter and Dacia got a new puppy – another rescue dog. They named him Hugo. Dacia taught Maddy how to juggle.

Sean Barton’s trial opened on a bracing October day. Zack watched as I got dressed for court. “Are you determined to do this?”

“I have to see it through,” I said.

He moved his chair closer. “Why?”

I reached over and touched the vertical line on his cheek. Since the night Sean attacked me, it had grown deeper. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I just need to understand.”

“Jo, there’s nothing to understand. The reasons a supposedly normal person does A rather than B are a mystery. Trying to figure Sean out is pointless. He’s a sociopath. Something in his wiring is twisted.”

“Maybe I need to understand that.”

Zack’s smile was weary. “Well, if it matters to you, it matters to me. I’m going with you.”

I tied Taylor’s Paul Klee scarf and checked the result in the mirror. “I was counting on that,” I said.

I hadn’t seen Sean Barton since the night of the attack. As I entered the courthouse and walked under the mosaic of the God of Laws holding aloft the balance of right and wrong, my pulse raced. Zack was beside me, and there were officers of the law and of the court everywhere, but I knew that the forces that drove Sean Barton had nothing to do with the law or even with knowing that right and wrong were opposing ends of a continuum. Sean was sui generis , and no system of laws could protect his fellow beings against his hungry amorality.

He had elected to act as his own counsel. He had been disbarred, so as he walked into the courtroom and took his place at the counsel’s table, he wasn’t wearing the traditional barrister’s robes. His street clothes had been carefully chosen – a double-breasted charcoal suit, a slate shirt, and a tightly knotted striped silk tie in shades of eggplant and mauve – penitential but not confessional. His blond hair was freshly barbered, and as he walked past me, he flashed me his disarming crooked smile. Zack’s hand tightened on my arm.

Linda Fritz was acting for the Crown. She was a tall, slim redhead. I’d seen her in action, and she was formidable: cool, prepared, and unflappable. Her opening address to the jury was a model of restraint and economy. She summarized the facts of the case and stated that the Crown would prove that Sean Barton had, with forethought and intent to kill, pushed Cristal Avilia from her balcony and stabbed Jason Brodnitz. Linda Fritz then gave a quick précis of the evidence the Crown would bring forth and identified her witnesses. Then, moving close to the jury box, she finished her opening statement with the assertion that the job of the Crown is simply to see that justice is done.

Without witnesses and without evidence that would exonerate him, Sean Barton had nothing but his own story, and in his opening, he cited the metaphor that would inform his defence. He had taken it from Robert Frost’s much-anthologized poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Sean presented himself as a man who, like Frost’s narrator, was confronted with a fork in the road and made a choice that defined his life.

He told his narrative compellingly, casting himself as the protagonist in a tragedy of passion doomed by forces beyond his control. When he met Cristal Avilia, Sean was in law school. She was a first-year student from a small town. They fell in love. They were both broke. After an evening of drinking and watching videos in the apartment of a well-heeled fellow student in the College of Law, Sean took his first wrong turn. One of the movies the group watched was Indecent Proposal , a film in which Robert Redford’s character offers a desperate young real estate speculator a million dollars to sleep with the realtor’s wife. The offer is accepted and a contract is signed.

The student hosting the party had urged Sean and Cristal to stay behind until the others left, then he made them an offer: $1,000 for an hour in bed with Cristal. According to Sean, Cristal’s objections that she didn’t want to have sex with a stranger were just an act. Sean and Cristal went outside, discussed the proposition, and after a brief fight, she agreed.

The rich young man liked what he paid for and there was a second tryst. The word got out, and Cristal’s career was launched. She was twenty years old.

At this point in the opening, Mr. Justice Nathaniel Peters, an affable, heavy-set man, interjected. He was concerned, he said, that Sean was incriminating himself.

Sean gave the judge his disarming smile. “Just do your job,” he said “And I’ll do mine.” At that point, Sean turned to the jury. “Cristal never looked back,” he said. I searched the faces of the jury members. They were clearly horrified, but Sean was oblivious.

He went on to describe what he persisted in referring to as their “parallel careers”: his in law, Cristal’s in prostitution. He was factual and upbeat as he talked about their decision to move from Saskatoon to Regina. His experience at the law firm where he articled had not been a good one, and in his words, “Cristal and I both wanted a fresh start in our careers.” He was hired by Falconer Shreve. Cristal, whom Sean praised as “a good money manager,” bought a warehouse downtown, had it renovated, and set up shop. Two young people starting out on promising careers.

According to Sean, Cristal liked her work. “She was a real people person,” he said. The gasp in the courtroom was audible, but Sean didn’t hear it. He was too busy spinning a tale of a life that was, in his telling, just a bowl of cherries until things started going wrong for him professionally. When he sensed that the people who mattered at Falconer Shreve no longer saw him as partnership material, his quarrels with Cristal became more serious. He felt that everything was slipping from his grasp. One of Cristal’s clients, an old lawyer who should have known better, started filling Cristal’s head with ideas that made her rebellious. She wanted to quit the business. At this point in his narrative, Sean approached the jury box, hands extended in a gesture that begged for empathy. “All of a sudden, it wasn’t the two of us against the world. After fourteen years with me, she wanted a different life. I had to get our relationship back on solid ground. I had to show her who was in charge.” As everyone in the courtroom waited for the sentence that would loop the noose around Sean’s neck, Mr. Justice Nathaniel Peters uttered his sternest warning against self-incrimination. Sean ignored him.