Nicolai Houm - The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

But these are their very last words to each other; this is how the two lovers say farewell:

“But Tom has been waiting for that DVD for ages. It’s the one about the guy who builds himself a log cabin, yeah? And lives alone in Alaska?”

“Sure. You do what you like.”

BEFORE THE COURThearing began, she had made a decision: she would meet the defendant’s eyes as often as possible. That her gaze would be reciprocated was something she had not taken into account. The first time she stood face-to-face with Scott Myers, outside Court 1A in Dane County Courthouse during the chaotic moments just before the hearing was due to start, he either pressed his chin against the narrow blue tie he had obviously borrowed, and mumbled something to his defense lawyer, or else used his superior height to stare placidly at a point above her head. When the doors opened, his lawyer escorted him swiftly inside. They were followed by the defendant’s father, a man with a graying crew cut and arms that stretched the seams of his blazer, who pushed Myers from behind with his large hand, as if covering his son’s back in some kind of forward sporting move.

Scott Myers kept his eyes fixed on a point above hers during his statement to the effect that he turned down the right to a pretrial plea—there was no point in denying that he had committed the offense. It was all over before Jane had managed to catch his piggy blue eyes. She had seen these eyes many times on the Green Bay Packers’ website. Scott Myers was a tackle on the reserve team. He was twenty-four years old, six foot five, and three hundred pounds. He showed no signs of remorse.

Outside the courthouse, when Jane was standing on the steps with Robert and Dorothy, Scott Myers’s father had come over to her.

“We pray for you, just as much as we pray for our son. I can’t hope that you will forgive him. We hope that God will.”

She noticed that her body weight increasingly rested on Robert, she felt his arm support her, then almost slacken before it held her up again.

“What we’re doing now, we do because it’s our duty. Because he is our son. He has a right to defend himself.”

Scott Myers’s father said all this as if preparing to lead troops into battle. He held his hands together just in front of his stomach. Only his red-rimmed eyes and the way he twisted a large gold ring round and round on his finger gave away that he was speaking from a bottomless depth. Jane would on several occasions come to wish that he was on her side.

On the way home Dorothy said, “I understand that you couldn’t bear to answer him,” which almost certainly meant the opposite. The catastrophic consequences of the accident had not penetrated into the barricaded, light-shy core of Dorothy’s mind, so she actually felt that Jane had been impolite.

“I somehow couldn’t breathe, Mom,” she explained.

For the duration of the court case, Jane was unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality. She kept a thin notebook in her handbag—she had torn out half the pages and thrown them away because they had been used for notes on a novel—and wrote down information that had seemed important at the time, or that she had been told was important. The notes were unsystematic. One page contained a detailed description of the jury selection process, even including which day of the week it usually took place. It was followed by an almost entirely blank area devoted to a single word.

Ravens .

On the next page, written in letters that grew larger and larger:

That I write this down means …

The sentence ended there and the next two pages were empty until the entry of a date and time and the words:

Jane A will make a victim impact statement. You will not be asked to do anything else .

Underneath, her name, scratched repeatedly in the same place until the pen had torn the paper.

She perceived her mind as a smooth, black surface made from a material capable of registering a particle storm of impressions. In the evenings, lying in bed at home or in her parents’ house or in Tom and Vladlena’s guest room, she tried to visualize the defendant’s bull neck, round red cheeks, and small goatee. She recalled the TV interview with one of the sheriff’s officers wearing a gold-braided cap and a hi-vis vest: he stood near the incident site and described the chain of events for a professionally appalled reporter from NBC. And she thought about the home page of the legal firm handling the defense, with its crass advertisement: Not all lawyers are used to the thrill of victory after an unconditional discharge. We’ll get you off the hook!

Then, she might feel another tightening of the airways, a few seconds of increased pulse rate, a pang of recognizable emotion, like a tattered little banner blowing in the wind at the far horizon beyond a desolate battlefield.

Myers’s defense neither apologized for his action nor attempted to modify his account. It wasn’t that kind of case. Both sides went in for plea bargaining. Myers would admit to all the essential elements in the prosecution’s case, but charges would not be pursued for minor breaches of law—such as leaving the scene of the accident. The prosecution wanted the case to be briskly concluded, without shades of doubt or pending options for appeal. As for Myers, any agreement would imply a reduced term of punishment. What such an outcome implied for Jane was obviously questionable. Her father held the not uncommon view that plea bargaining in cases such as this was typical of a legal system that was rotten to the core. Others have argued that if justice was seen to be done swiftly and in a satisfactory way, both parties would have the best prospect of moving on. As far as Jane was concerned, the first opinion was uninteresting and the second one so naïve that she briefly recalled what it felt like to laugh.

Regardless, the judge quashed the proposal and the case got underway. The prosecution’s version of the events was identical to what she had been told by the sheriff’s department.

Scott Myers, Aaron Harlan, a former teammate, and Harlan’s girlfriend, Nicole Cason, had gone out together to a local bar, the Red Shed. According to Cason, called as a witness for the prosecution, Myers had drunk between three and six alcoholic drinks. She was certain it had been at least three because they had taken turns to buy the first rounds and she remembered having had just enough cash to pay for the Long Island iced teas for Myers and Harlan, and a low-alcohol beer for herself—the bar did not accept credit cards. During the last hour before they left the Red Shed, Myers and Harlan played foosball while Cason sat in a booth chatting to an old friend. She saw Myers pass by three times with a beer in each hand, on his way from the counter to the corner with the games table. This made her assume that Myers might have consumed a total of six alcoholic drinks.

Around ten o’clock, Harlan got into a fight with another customer, an acquaintance from when he had been playing with the Wisconsin Badgers, the university team. Myers joined in the quarrel and became so loud that the female bouncer asked him to leave. Nicole Cason drove Myers and Harlan to the latter’s apartment in Darbo-Worthington. The plan was that Myers would stay the night. Cason went home then because the atmosphere in the car had become too much like a guys’ night out .

Once at Harlan’s place, Myers started drinking beer and tequila shots. Over the course of the evening, several other guests came and went. When Myers and Harlan were on their own again, they shared a gram of cocaine that Harlan had acquired the night before. In the police interrogation, Harlan had only been able to state how much cocaine he had bought and what they drank, as everything else had been wiped from his memory. The time when Myers had suddenly made up his mind to leave Harlan’s apartment had been determined from an incoherent text message sent by Harlan to Cason, in which he joked that he was so out of it, he couldn’t find Myers in his two-bedroom apartment.