T. Boyle: Wild Child and Other Stories

— but the thought was too depressing and he let it die. He resisted the urge to turn round and give her a look, a smile, a wink, the least gesture, anything. It was too painful to see her there, under constraint, his daughter dragged out of school for this, and then he didn’t want anybody to think he was coaching her or coercing her in any way. Jerry had no such scruples, though. He’d drilled her over and over and he’d even gone to the extreme of asking her — or no, instructing her — to wear something that might conform to the court’s idea of what a good, honest, straightforward child was like, something that would make her look younger than she was, too young to bend the truth and far too young even to think about getting behind the wheel of a car.

Three times Jerry had sent her back to change outfits until finally, with a little persuasion from the au pair (Allie, and he’d have to remember to slip her a twenty, a twenty at least, because she was gold, pure gold), she put on a lacy white high-collared dress she’d worn for some kind of pageant at school, with matching white tights and patent-leather shoes. There was something wrong there in the living room, he could see that, something in the way she held her shoulders and stamped up the stairs to her room, her face clenched and her eyes burning into him, and he should have recognized it, should have given her just a hair more of his attention, but Marcy was there and she had her opinion and Jerry was being an autocrat and he himself had his hands full — he couldn’t eat or think or do anything other than maybe slip into the pantry and tip the bottle of Macallan over the flask. By the time he thought of it, they were in the car, and he tried, he did, leaning across the seat to ply her with little jokes about getting a free day off and what her teachers were going to think and what Aaron Burr might have done — he would’ve just shot somebody, right? — but Jerry was drilling her one last time and she was sunk into the seat beside Marcy, already clamped up.

The courtroom, this courtroom, the one she was in now, was a duplicate of the one in which her father’s attorney had quizzed her an hour and a half ago, except that it was filled with people. They were all old, or older, anyway, except for one woman in a formfitting plaid jacket Angelle had seen in the window at Nordstrom who must have been in her twenties. She was in the jury box, looking bored.

The other jurors were mostly men, businessmen, she supposed, with balding heads and recessed eyes and big meaty hands clasped in their laps or grasping the rail in front of them. One of them looked like the principal of her school, Dr. Damon, but he wasn’t.

The judge sat up at his desk in the front of the room, which they called a bench but wasn’t a bench at all, the flag of the State of California on one side of him and the American flag on the other.

She was seated in the front row, between Dolores and Allie, and her father and Mr. Apodaca sat at a desk in front of her, the shoulders of their suits puffed up as if they were wearing football pads. Her father’s suit was so dark she could see the dandruff there, a little spray of it like dust on the collar of his jacket, and she felt embarrassed for him. And sorry for him, sorry for him too — and for herself. And Lisette. She looked up at the judge and then the district attorney with his grim gray tight-shaven face and the scowling woman beside him, and couldn’t help thinking about what Mr.

Apodaca had told her, and it made her shrink into herself when Mr.

Apodaca called her name and the judge, reading the look on her face, tried to give her a smile of encouragement.

She wasn’t aware of walking across the floor or of the hush that fell over the courtroom or even the bailiff who asked her to hold up her right hand and swear to tell the truth — all this, as if she were recalling a fragmented dream, would come to her later. But then she was seated in the witness chair and everything was bright and loud suddenly, as if she’d just switched channels on the TV. Mr. Apodaca was right there before her, his voice rising sweetly, almost as if he were singing, and he was leading her through the questions they’d rehearsed over and over again. Yes, she told him, her father was late, and yes, it was getting dark, and no, she didn’t notice anything strange about him. He was her father and he always picked her sister and her up on Wednesdays, she volunteered, because Wednesdays were when Allie and Dolores both had their day off and there was no one else to do it because her mother was in France.

They were all watching her now, the court gone absolutely silent, so silent you would have thought everyone had tiptoed out the door, but there they all were, hanging on her every word. She wanted to say more about her mother, about how her mother was coming home soon — had promised as much the last time she’d called long distance from her apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés — but Mr.

Apodaca wouldn’t let her. He kept leading her along, using his sugary voice now, talking down to her, and she wanted to speak up and tell him he didn’t have to treat her like that, tell him about her mother, Lisette, the school and the lawn and the trees and the way the interior of the car smelled and the heat of the liquor on her father’s breath — anything that would forestall the inevitable, the question that was tucked in just behind this last one, the question on the point of which everything turned, because now she heard it, murmurous and soft and sweet on her father’s attorney’s lips: “Who was driving?”

“I just wanted to say one thing,” she said, lifting her eyes now to look at Mr. Apodaca and only Mr. Apodaca, his dog’s eyes, his pleading soft baby-talking face, “just because, well, I wanted to say you’re wrong about my mother, because she is coming home — she told me so herself, on, on the phone—” She couldn’t help herself.

Her voice was cracking.

“Yes,” he said too quickly, a hiss of breath, “yes, I understand that, Angelle, but we need to establish … you need to answer the question.”

Oh, and now the silence went even deeper, the silence of the deep sea, of outer space, of the arctic night when you couldn’t hear the runners of the sled or the feet of the dogs bleeding into the snow, and her eyes jumped to her father’s then, the look on his face of hopefulness and fear and confusion, and she loved him in that moment more than she ever had.

“Angelle,” Mr. Apodaca was saying, murmuring. “Angelle?”

She turned her face back to him, blotting out the judge, the D.A., the woman in the plaid jacket who was probably a college student, probably cool, and waited for the question to drop.

“Who,” Mr. Apodaca repeated, slowing it down now,

“was”—slower, slower still—“driving?”

She lifted her chin then to look at the judge and heard the words coming out of her mouth as if they’d been planted there, telling the truth, the hurtful truth, the truth no one would have guessed because she was almost thirteen now, almost a teenager, and she let them know it. “I was,” she said, and the courtroom roared to life with so many people buzzing at once she thought at first they hadn’t heard her. So she said it again, said it louder, much louder, so loud she might have been shouting it to the man with the camera at the back of the long churchy room with its sweat-burnished pews and the flags and emblems and all the rest. And then she looked away from the judge, away from the spectators and the man with the camera and the court recorder and the bank of windows so brilliant with light you would have thought a bomb had gone off there, and looked directly at her father.

In my business, where you put something like forty to forty-five thousand miles a year on your vehicle and the sweet suck of the engine at 3,500 rpm is like another kind of breathing, you can’t afford distractions. Can’t afford to get tired or lazy or lift your eyes from the road to appreciate the way the fog reshapes the palms on Ocean Avenue or the light slips down the flanks of the mountains on that mind-blowing stretch of Highway 1 between Malibu and Oxnard. Get distracted and you could wind up meat. I know that.