Rose Connors: Temporary Sanity

The mother sobs now, leaning to one side in the chair, her good arm over her eyes. “He didn’t mean it,” she repeats. “He didn’t. He had too much to drink, that’s all. He loses his temper when he drinks that much. He didn’t mean to hurt anybody. He probably won’t even remember.”

Harry lifts the telephone receiver, but I press my hand over the keypad before he can punch in the numbers. “I’ll take her,” I tell him. “I’ll take her to Cape Cod Hospital. But that’s all, Harry. I can’t do any more than that. You can’t either. Not with Buck’s trial starting tomorrow.”

Harry presses the receiver against the front of his suit jacket, looking like a schoolboy about to pledge allegiance to the flag. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll call and tell them you’re coming.”

The Kydd and his two clients struggle to raise the thin woman from the chair without hurting her arm. My suit jacket falls to the floor, but she manages to hold on to the blanket and the ice compress. The men wrap the blanket carefully around her shoulders before guiding her out to the porch, down the front steps, and across the snow-covered lawn toward my ancient Thunderbird.

The daughter follows without a word, her thin denim jacket wide open in the winter wind. She looks back at me from the bottom step and when our eyes meet, it hits me. Something is wrong with this picture.

The young girl brought her bleeding mother to a law office. Not a hospital; not even a doctor’s office. A law office.

Somewhere in the depths of my stomach I register a once familiar tightness. A few seconds pass before I can name it: it’s the onset of dread.

I hurry up the old staircase, grab my parka from the hook at the top, and head back down. I’m almost out the door when Harry catches up to me. “Marty,” he says.

I pause in the doorway. Harry’s rugged features are worried. He feels it too. Something isn’t right here. There’s a reason this skinny teenage girl brought her battered mother to us.

He cups the side of my face in his big hand the way he always does now. “Be careful” is all he says.

The Kydd and his helpers install the long woman in a prone position on the backseat of the Thunderbird, leaving her sullen daughter with no choice but to ride shotgun. When I get behind the wheel, she moves to the far edge of her seat and stares out the side window. I look to the rear, where the mother has her eyes closed, her left arm once again slung over her face. The blanket lies across her chest, the cold compress against her mouth.

I look out my own window at the Kydd as I start the car and turn both the heat and the defrost on high. He shrugs his stooped shoulders at me and grins. “Good luck,” he says.

If we don’t hit traffic, we’ll reach Cape Cod Hospital in little more than half an hour. For the first ten minutes, the teenager beside me doesn’t utter a word. She keeps her face turned away, her thumb nail back between her teeth. Her limp, dirty-blond hair hangs forward, almost covering the fine features of her profile.

“I’m Marty Nickerson,” I finally say to her. “What’s your name?” She turns toward me, looking surprised to see me here, as if she assumed the car had been driving itself to the hospital. “I know who you are,” she says, so quietly I can barely hear. “I saw you on the news all weekend.”

The news. Stanley and I argued pretrial motions in Buck Hammond’s case on Friday. The press was all over us. They were even worse with Buck’s wife. One group of reporters essentially held her hostage in the courthouse hallway; I had to elbow my way in for the rescue.

My head aches all over again as I remember the mobbed courtroom, the microphones outstretched to receive Stanley’s caustic comments, the camera lights blinding all of us. Buck’s trial promises to be nothing short of a circus.

I look back at my soft-spoken passenger, still turned toward me. Her eyes aren’t quite focused, like those of someone under hypnosis. “I’m Maggie,” she says after a pause, and it occurs to me that Harry should have checked her pulse as well. “Maggie Baker,” she adds.

She turns toward the rear seat, then looks back at me. “That’s my mother, Sonia Baker. Don’t even think about calling her Sonny. She hates it when people do.”

“Okay.” I’m grateful for even this tidbit of volunteered information.

Maggie turns away again, so I check on her mother in the rearview mirror. Sonia Baker appears to be asleep-eyes closed, breathing deep and regular-though it’s hard for me to believe that’s possible under the circumstances.

I’d like to ask Maggie why she brought her injured mother to our law office, but something tells me to wait, to move slowly here. This young girl, nothing but tough and surly until just moments ago, now seems vulnerable, fragile even.

“Where do you and your mom live?” I’m hoping to stay on neutral territory a little longer.

Maggie twirls one long strand of fine hair around her right index finger; she’s distracted. “On Bayview Road,” she says after a while. “You know where it is.”

I nod, aware that Maggie’s response was a statement, not a question.

Bayview Road intersects with the east end of Forest Beach Road, just a stone’s throw from Buck Hammond’s cottage. I’ve been there at least a dozen times during the past six weeks, visiting Buck’s wife, Patty, eliciting the awful, necessary details. Preparing her-to the extent possible-for Buck’s trial, for the ordeal she will have to endure on the witness stand, the nightmare she will have to relive, this time in public.

The entire Forest Beach area is a magnet for summer tourists. Its beaches are wild and pristine, vast stretches of white sand punctuated by rugged black jetties, year-round favorite sunning spots for hundreds of harbor seals. The cottages in the Forest Beach neighborhood are quaint, but small; most aren’t winterized. The year-round residents are few and far between.

“You must know Buck Hammond, then,” I say to Maggie. “You’re practically neighbors.”

“We know Buck. Mom and I both know Patty and Buck. He’s in big trouble, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he is.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not fair,” she says, her small voice growing strong for the first time. “After what that creep did to their little boy.”

I agree, of course, but say nothing.

Minutes pass before I summon the courage to broach the matter at hand. “Maggie,” I ask, “the man who did this to your mother, what’s his name?”

“Howard,” she says to the dashboard. “Howard Davis.”

I catch my breath before I can stop myself, but Maggie doesn’t seem to notice. She looks back at her mother, then closes her eyes and shakes her head again, letting out a short, bitter laugh. “Mom calls him Howie, if you can believe that.”

I know Howard Davis; he’s been a Barnstable County parole officer for two decades. He’s an enormous hulk-he hardly seems human-with a booming voice and an intimidating stance. He routinely handles the most dangerous of the county’s parolees; he’s the only employee on staff with any chance of keeping them in line. The first time I saw Howard Davis, in the courthouse hallway with one of his clients, I was at a complete loss. There was no way to tell which one was the ex-con.

Sonia Baker is lucky she’s breathing. And Howard Davis is going to jail, parole officer or not. I don’t say either of those things to Maggie, though. She doesn’t need any more drama at the moment.

“Does Howard Davis live on Bayview Road with you?” I ask instead.

Maggie stares at me without speaking for a minute, tears pooling in her eyes, but not falling anymore. “Yes,” she whispers.