Small Great Things Read online

Oh, there you are, I think as I look into Edison's eyes. This is the boy I know. The boy I hooked my star on.

  "It seems," I say lightly, "that I am in need of a date to my own trial."

  Edison lets go of my wrist. He holds out his arm, crooked at the elbow, old-fashioned and courtly, even though he is still wearing his pajamas, even though I have a scarf wrapped around my hair, even though this is not a ball we are attending, but more of a gauntlet to run. "It would be my pleasure," he says.

  --

  LAST NIGHT, KENNEDY had showed up at my house unexpected. Her husband and daughter were with her; she had come straight from some town about two hours away and was bursting to share her news with me: MCADD had shown up in Davis Bauer's newborn screening.

  I stared at the results she showed me, the same ones a doctor friend of her husband's had explained to her. "But that's...that's..."

  "Lucky," she finished. "For you, anyway. I don't know if these results were missing from the file accidentally, or if someone tanked them purposely because they knew it would make you less culpable. But what's important is that we have the information now, and we're going to ride it to an acquittal."

  MCADD is a much more dangerous medical condition than a grade one patent ductus, the heart ailment Kennedy had planned to raise. It is not a lie, anymore, to say that the Bauer baby had had a life-threatening disorder.

  She wouldn't be lying in court. Just me.

  I had tried a half dozen times to come clean to Kennedy, especially as our relationship shifted from a professional track into a personal one. But as it turned out, that just made it worse. At first I couldn't tell her that I had intervened and touched Davis Bauer when he was seizing because I didn't know if I could trust her, or how the truth would reflect on my case. But now, I couldn't tell her because I was ashamed to have ever lied in the first place.

  I burst into tears.

  "Those better be tears of happiness," she said. "Or gratitude for my remarkable legal talent."

  "That poor baby," I managed. "It's so...arbitrary."

  But I wasn't crying for Davis Bauer, and I wasn't crying because of my own dishonesty. I was crying because Kennedy had been right all along--it really didn't matter if the nurse attending to Davis Bauer was Black or white or purple. It didn't matter if I tried to resuscitate that baby or not. None of it would have made a difference.

  She put her hand on my arm. "Ruth," Kennedy reminded me. "Bad things happen to good people every day."

  --

  MY CELLPHONE RINGS just as the bus pulls up to our stop downtown. Edison and I step off as Adisa's voice fills my ear. "Girl, you not gonna believe this. Where you at?"

  I look at a sign. "College Street."

  "Well, walk toward the green."

  I get my bearings, turning with Edison in tow. The courthouse stands a block away from the public park, and Kennedy has given me express directions not to approach from this direction, because I will be bombarded by press.

  But surely it can't hurt to see what's going on from a distance.

  I hear them before I see them, their strong voices braided together in harmony and climbing to the sky like Jack's beanstalk, aimed for Heaven. It is a sea of faces, so many shades of brown, singing "Oh, Freedom." In the front, on a small makeshift dais with a network logo backdrop behind him, is Wallace Mercy. Police form a human barrier, their arms outstretched, as if they are trying to cast a spell to prevent violence. Meanwhile, Elm Street itself is lined with news vans, their dishes craned to the sun, while reporters clutch their microphones with their backs to the green and cameramen film a stream of footage.

  "My God," I breathe.

  "I didn't have anything to do with it, but that's for you," Adisa says proudly. "You should march right up those front steps with your head held high."

  "I can't." Kennedy and I have a prearranged meeting spot.

  "Okay," Adisa says, but I can hear the disappointment in her voice.

  "I'll see you in there," I tell her. "And, Adisa? Thanks for coming."

  She tsks. "Where else would I be?" she says, and then the line goes dead.

  --

  EDISON AND I wander past oblivious Yale students, wearing backpacks like tortoise shells; past the Gothic buildings of the residential colleges that are safely walled off behind black gates; past the Poetry Lady--the homeless woman who will recite a few lines for a donation. When we reach the parish house on Wall Street, we slip behind the building unnoticed, into an empty lot.

  "Now what?" Edison asks. He is wearing the suit he wore to Mama's funeral. On any other day, he might be a boy going to a college interview.

  "Now we wait," I tell him. Kennedy has a plan to sneak me into the back entrance, where I won't attract media attention. She's asked me to trust her.

  Fool that I am, I do.

  LAST NIGHT, WHEN I COULDN'T fall asleep, I watched some cable show that was on at 3:00 A.M. about how Indians used to live. They showed a reenactment, a dude in a loincloth, setting fire to a pile of leaves on the long line of a tree that had been split lengthwise. Then, after it burned, he scraped it out with what looked like a clamshell, repeating the process until the canoe was hollowed out. That's what I feel like, today. Like someone has rubbed me raw from the inside, until I'm empty.

  It's kind of surprising, because I've been waiting so long for today. I thought for sure I'd have the energy of Superman. I was going to war for my son, and nothing was going to stop me.

  But, strangely, I have a sense that I've reached the combat zone and found it deserted.

  I'm tired. I'm twenty-five years old and I have lived enough for ten men.

  Brit comes out of the bathroom. "All yours," she says. She is wearing a bra and her panty hose, which the prosecutor told her to wear, so that she looks conservative.

  "And you," she suggested, "should wear a hat."

  Fuck that.

  As far as I'm concerned, this is the memorial my son deserves: if I cannot have him back, I will make sure the people responsible for it are punished, and that others like them are left trembling with fear.

  I run the hot water and hold my hands under the faucet. Then I lather up with shaving cream. I rub this all over my scalp and start to use my straightedge to scrape my head smooth.

  Maybe it's the fact that I could not sleep; or I suppose the crater that's taken up residence inside me is making me shaky--for whatever reason, I nick myself just above the left ear. It stings like a mother as the soap runs into the cut.

  I press a washcloth against my head, but scalp wounds take a little while to clot. After a minute I just let go, watch the streak of blood run down my neck, under my collar.

  It looks like a red flag, coming from my swastika tattoo. I'm mesmerized by the combination: the white soap, the pale skin, the vivid stain.

  --

  FIRST WE DRIVE in the opposite direction of the courthouse. There's frost on the front windshield of the pickup and it's sunny, the kind of day that looks perfect until you realize how cold it is when you step outside. We are dressed up--me in the suit jacket that Francis and I share, and Brit in a black dress that used to hug her body and that now hangs on it.

  We're the only car in the lot. After I park, I get out and come around to Brit's side. This is not because I'm such a gentleman but because she won't get out. I kneel down beside her, put my hand on her knee. "It's okay," I say. "We can lean on each other."

  She juts out her chin, like I've seen her do when she thinks someone is about to dismiss her as weak or ineffective. Then she unfolds herself from the truck. She is wearing flat shoes, the way Odette Lawton told her to, but her coat is short and only reaches to the hip, and I can tell the wind whips through the fabric of her dress fast. I try to stand between her and the gusts, as if I could change up the weather for her.

  When we get there, the sun is just hitting the headstone in a way that makes it sparkle. It's white. Blinding white. Brit bends down and traces the letters of Davis's name. The day of his birth, the hop