Small Great Things Read online

  Howard looks at me over Ruth's head. What?

  Holy shit. Judge Thunder is going to use the escape hatch I gave him as a matter of routine. I hold my breath.

  "I have researched the law, and have reviewed the evidence in this case very carefully. There is no credible proof that the death of this child was causally related to any action or inaction of the defendant's." He faces Ruth. "I am very sorry you had to go through what you did at your workplace, ma'am." He smacks his gavel. "I grant the defense's motion."

  In this humbling moment I learn that not only can I not think like a prosecutor, I am woefully off-base about the mental machinations of a judge. I turn, a dazed laugh bubbling up inside me. Ruth's brow is furrowed. "I don't understand."

  He hasn't declared a mistrial. He's granted a bona fide acquittal.

  "Ruth," I say, grinning. "You are free to go."

  FREEDOM IS THE FRAGILE NECK of a daffodil, after the longest of winters. It's the sound of your voice, without anyone drowning you out. It's having the grace to say yes, and more important, the right to say no. At the heart of freedom, hope beats: a pulse of possibility.

  I am the same woman I was five minutes ago. I'm rooted to the same chair. My hands are flattened on the same scarred table. My lawyers are both still flanking me. That fluorescent light overhead is still spitting like a cockroach. Nothing has changed, and everything is different.

  In a daze, I walk out of the courtroom. A bumper crop of microphones blooms in front of me. Kennedy instructs everyone that although her client is obviously delighted with the verdict, we will not be making any statements until we give an official press conference tomorrow.

  That right now, her client has to get home to her son.

  There are a few stragglers, hoping for a sound bite, but eventually they drift away. There is a professor being arraigned down the hall for possession of child pornography.

  The world turns, and there's another victim, another bully. It's the arc of someone else's story now.

  I text Edison, who calls me even though he has to leave class to do it, and I listen to the relief braided through his words. I call Adisa at work, and have to hold the phone away from my ear as she screams with joy. I'm interrupted by a text from Christina: a full row of smiling emojis, and then a hamburger and a glass of wine and a question mark.

  Rain check? I type back.

  "Ruth," Kennedy says, when she finds me standing with my phone in my hand, staring into space. "You all right?"

  "I don't know," I reply, completely honest. "It's really over?"

  Howard smiles. "It is really, truly, unequivocally over."

  "Thank you," I say. I embrace him, and then I face Kennedy. "And you..." I shake my head. "I don't even know what to say."

  "Think on it," Kennedy says, hugging me. "You can tell me next week when we have lunch."

  I pull back, meeting her eyes. "I'd like that," I say, and something shifts between us. It's power, I realize, and we are dead even.

  Suddenly I realize that in my astonishment at the verdict, I left my mother's lucky scarf in the courtroom. "I forgot something. I'll meet you downstairs."

  When I reach the double doors, there's a bailiff stationed outside. "Ma'am?"

  "I'm sorry--there was a scarf...? Can I..."

  "Sure." He waves me inside.

  I'm alone in the courtroom. I walk down the aisle of the gallery, past the bar, to the spot where I was sitting. My mother's scarf is curled underneath the desk. I pick it up, feed it like a seam through my hands.

  I look around the empty chamber. One day, Edison might be arguing a case here, instead of sitting next to a lawyer like I have been. One day he might even be on the judge's bench.

  I close my eyes, so that I can keep this minute with me. I listen to the silence.

  It feels like light-years since I was brought into another courtroom down the hall for my arraignment, wearing shackles and a nightgown and not allowed to speak for myself. It feels like forever since I was told what I could not do.

  "Yes," I say softly, because it is the opposite of restraint. Because it breaks chains. Because I can.

  I ball my hands into fists and tilt back my head and let the word rip from my throat. Yes.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.

  --NELSON MANDELA, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM

  IN THE EXAMINATION ROOM AT the clinic, I take a rubber glove out of the dispenser and blow it up, tying off the bottom. I take a pen and draw eyes, a beak. "Daddy," my daughter says. "You made me a chicken."

  "Chicken?" I say. "I can't believe you think that's a chicken. That is clearly a rooster."

  She frowns. "What's the difference?"

  Well, I walked right into that one, didn't I? But there's no way I'm going to describe the birds and the bees to my three-year-old while we're sitting waiting for her to get tested for strep. I'll let Deborah do that when she gets home from work.

  Deborah, my wife, is a stockbroker. I took her last name when we got married, hoping to start over as someone new, someone better. She is the one with the nine-to-fiver, while I stay at home with Carys, and fit my speaking gigs around her playdates and her nursery school. I work with the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. I go to high schools and prisons and temples and churches, talking about hate.

  I tell these groups about how I used to beat people up because I was hurting so bad, and either I was going to hurt them, or I was going to hurt myself. I explain that made me feel like I had a purpose. I tell them about the festivals I went to, where musicians sang about white supremacy and children played with racist games and toys. I describe my time in prison, and my work as a webmaster for a hate site. I talk about my first wife. I say that hate ate her from the inside out, but what really happened was more mundane: a bottle of pills, swallowed with a bottle of vodka. She could never handle seeing the world as it really is, and so finally, she found a way to keep her eyes closed forever.

  I tell them that there is nothing more selfish than trying to change someone's mind because they don't think like you. Just because something is different does not mean it should not be respected.

  I tell them this: the part of the brain, physiologically, that allows us to blame everything on people we do not really know is the same part of the brain that allows us to have compassion for strangers. Yes, the Nazis made Jews the scapegoats, to the point of near extinction. But that same bit of tissue in the mind is what led others to send money and supplies and relief, even when they were half a world away.

  In my talk, I describe the long road to leaving. It started with a visit in the middle of the night--hooded, faceless individuals sent from others in power who broke down our door and beat us. Francis was thrown down a flight of stairs: me, I had three broken ribs. It was our bon voyage party, I suppose. I shut down Lonewolf.org the next day. Then there were the divorce papers I was having drawn up when Brit killed herself.

  Even now, I make mistakes. I still feel the need to slam into something or someone from time to time, but now I do it on the rink in an ice hockey league. I'm probably more cautious than I should be around black dudes. But I'm even more cautious with the white ones in the pickup trucks with Confederate flags hanging in the back windows. Because I used to be who they are, and I know what they are capable of.

  Many of the groups I meet with do not believe that I could possibly have changed so dramatically. That's when I tell them about my wife. Deborah knows everything about me, my past. She has managed to forgive me. And if she can forgive me, how could I not try to forgive myself?

  I do penance. Three to four times a week, I relive my mistakes in front of an audience. I feel them hate me. I think I deserve it.

  "Daddy," Carys says, "my throat hurts."

  "I know, baby," I tell her. I pull her onto my lap just as the door opens.

  The nurse comes in scanning Carys's intake form at this walk-in clinic. "H