Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

–

JUDGE THUNDER STRIKES that comment from the record, and when Kennedy sits down, she looks just as surprised by her outburst as I am. “Sorry,” she murmurs. “That just slipped out.” The judge, though, is furious. He calls counsel up for a sidebar. There is a noise machine again that prevents me from hearing what he says, but from the color of his face, and the full-throttle anger as he laces into my lawyer, I know he didn’t ask her up there to praise her.

“That,” Kennedy tells me, a little white around the gills when she returns, “is why you don’t bring up race in a courtroom.”

Judge Thunder decides that his back spasm merits adjournment for the rest of the day.

Because of the snow, it takes us longer to get home. When Edison and I turn the corner on our block, we are damp and exhausted. A man is trying to dig out his car using only his gloved hands. Two neighborhood boys are in the thick of a snowball fight; one missile smacks against Edison’s back.

There is a car sitting in front of our house. It’s a black sedan with a driver, which isn’t something you see very often around here, at least not once you get off the Yale campus. As I approach, the rear door opens and a woman stands up. She is wearing a ski parka and furry boots and is buried under a layer of wool-a hat, a scarf. It takes me a moment to realize that this is Christina.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, truly surprised. In all the years I’ve been in East End, Christina has not come to visit. In all the years, I haven’t invited her.

It’s not that I’m ashamed of my home. I love where I live, how I live. It’s that I did not think I could handle the excessive way she’d exclaim about how cute the space was, how cozy, how me.

“I’ve been in court for the last two days,” she admits, and I’m shocked. I’ve scanned that gallery. I haven’t noticed her there, and Christina is very hard to overlook.

She unzips her coat, revealing a ratty flannel shirt and baggy jeans, as far away from her couture sheaths as possible. “I wore camouflage,” she says, smiling shyly. She looks over my shoulder, to Edison. “Edison! My God, I haven’t seen you since you were shorter than your mother…”

He jerks his chin, an awkward hello.

“Edison, why don’t you go inside?” I suggest, and when he does, I meet Christina’s gaze. “I don’t understand. If the press found out that you were here-”

“Then I’d tell them to go screw themselves,” she says firmly. “The hell with Congress. I told Larry I was coming, and that it wasn’t negotiable. If anyone from the press asks, I’m just going to tell them the truth: that you and I go way back.”

“Christina,” I ask again, “what are you doing here ?”

She could have texted. She could have called. She could have simply sat in the courtroom to lend moral support. But instead, she has been waiting in front of my door for God knows how long.

“I’m your friend, ” she says quietly. “Believe it or not, Ruth, this is what friends do . ” She looks up at me, and I realize she has tears in her eyes. “What they said happened to you-the police breaking in. The handcuffs. The way they attacked Edison. I never imagined…” She falters, then gathers up the weeds of her thoughts and offers me the saddest, truest bouquet. “I didn’t know.”

“Why would you?” I reply-not angry, not hurt, just stating a fact. “You’ll never have to.”

Christina wipes at her eyes, smearing her mascara. “I don’t know if I ever told you this story,” she says. “It’s about your mother. It was a long time ago, when I was in college. I was driving back home from Vassar for Thanksgiving break, and there was a hitchhiker on the side of the road on the Taconic Parkway. He was a Black man, and he had a bum leg. He was literally walking on crutches. So I pulled over and asked if he needed a ride. I took him all the way to Penn Station, so that he could get on a train to visit his family in D.C.” She folds her coat more tightly around her. “When I got home, and Lou came into my room to help me unpack, I told her what I’d done. I thought she’d be proud of me, being a Good Samaritan and all. Instead, she got so angry, Ruth! I swear, I’d never seen her like that. She grabbed my arms and shook me; she couldn’t even speak at first. Don’t you ever, ever do that again, she told me, and I was so shocked I promised I wouldn’t.” Christina looks at me. “Today I sat in that courtroom and I listened to that detective talk about how he busted in your door in the middle of the night and pushed you down and held back Edison and I kept hearing Lou’s voice in my head, after I told her about the Black hitchhiker. I knew your mama reacted that way to me because she was scared. But all these years, I thought she was trying to keep me safe. Now, I know she was trying to keep him safe.”

I realize that for years, I’ve made the assumption that Christina looks at me as someone from her past to be tolerated, an unfortunate to be helped. As children I felt like we were equals. But as we got older, as we became more aware of what was different about us, instead of what was similar, I felt a wedge drive between us. I secretly criticized her for making judgments about me and my life without asking me questions directly. She was the diva and I was the supporting player in her story. But I conveniently forgot to point out to myself that I was the one who’d cast her in that role. I’d blamed Christina for building that invisible wall without admitting I’d added a few bricks of my own.

“I left the money under your welcome mat,” I blurt out.

“I know,” Christina says. “I should have superglued it to your palm.”

There’s a foot of space, and a world of contrast, between Christina and me. Yet I, too, know how hard it is to peel back the veneer of your life, and to peek at the real. It’s like waking up in a room and getting out of bed and realizing the furniture has been completely rearranged. You will eventually find your way out, but it’s going to be slow going, and you’re bound to get some bruises along the way.

I reach out and squeeze Christina’s hand. “Why don’t you come inside?” I say.

–

THE NEXT DAY is frigid and clear. The memory of yesterday’s snowstorm has been scraped off the highways and the temperature keeps some of the crowd away from the front steps of the courthouse. Even Judge Thunder seems settled, made complacent by either whatever drugs he got for his sore back or the fact that we are nearing the end of the prosecution’s witnesses. Today, the first person called is the state medical examiner, Dr. Bill Binnie, who studied under the famous Henry Lee. He is younger than I would have imagined, with delicate hands that flutter during his responses, like trained birds sitting in his lap; and he has movie-star looks, so the ladies in the jury are hanging on his responses, even when they are simply the boring litany of all the accomplishments on his CV. “When did you first hear about Davis Bauer, Doctor?” the prosecutor asks.

“My office received a phone message from Corinne McAvoy, a nurse at Mercy-West Haven Hospital.”

“Did you respond?”

“Yes. After retrieving the infant’s body, we did an autopsy.”

“Can you tell the court what that entails?”

“Sure,” he says, turning to the jury. “I perform both an external and an internal examination. During the external exam, I look over the body for bruises and to see if there are any marks. I take measurements of the body, and the circumference of the head, and photograph the body. I take blood and bile samples. Then, to perform the internal examination, I make a Y incision in the chest, pull back the skin, and examine the lungs and the heart and the liver as well as other organs, checking for rupture, for gross abnormalities. We weigh and measure the organs. We take tissue samples. And then we send the samples to toxicology and await the results, in order to make a reasonable and factual conclusion about the cause of death.”