“Ramon,” she said.
“What about him?”
“Isn’t that something like Raymond, only in Spanish?”
“It is, yeah.”
“Is that a coincidence?”
“Nope. No coincidence.”
She fell silent again for long enough that Raymond thought she might have fallen back asleep.
He looked past her slack face and watched buildings and pedestrians flashing by. It was dusk, almost dark. The time of day when Luis had been shot. Raymond wondered what a muzzle flash from a gun would look like in that light. Also, he hoped he would never find out.
“See?” she said suddenly, surprising him. “You’re making your mark on the world.”
“Think so?”
“I know so,” she said.
Then she definitely fell back asleep. Raymond knew because there was snoring involved.
Chapter Fourteen
* * *
What Kind of Person?
Raymond knocked on her door at 8:00 sharp the following morning.
“Come in, Raymond,” she called. But her voice sounded oddly distant and small.
He let himself in with the keys.
“Where are you?” he called, looking around the empty living room.
He hoped she was in the bathroom putting the finishing touches on her preparations for the morning.
“I’m in the bedroom,” she said. “You may come in.”
He walked to the doorway and stopped dead, looking inside.
She was still in bed.
Her hair was down, long and unbraided. She wore a high-collared nightgown. She lay holding the blankets up to her chest with both arthritic hands. Louise lay curled against her right hip, looking over her own shoulder blades at Raymond.
In the middle of his wave of disappointment, he found one bright little moment. He was happy that she had arrived home the night before with enough energy to put herself properly to bed.
“You’re not ready,” he said.
“I’m not going.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry. But I can’t. I just can’t. It’s too hard.”
“Physically hard?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “That, too. You don’t have to go, of course, if it’s hard for you, too. But if you do, will you please take notes and tell me more or less what I missed? Just the generals, though. The big developments. The details are too much to bear. You will be the only one there representing us today. If you go.”
“Will you go tomorrow?”
“I think I will go when the jury is ready to decide. I want to hear what they decide. Do you think that will be tomorrow or the next day? Or later?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“Well, you let me know. Please. If you can. I’m sorry, Raymond. I know you wanted me to go. But I have a long, sordid history with death and dying. When something brings it back up, it just knocks the legs right out from under me. Not that Luis’s death in the present is not enough, but the combination of past and present is more than I can bear.”
He stood a moment, his shoulder leaning against the doorjamb, hoping she would volunteer more about her past. Failing that, he hoped he would discover that he had grown into someone who was brave enough to ask.
Neither wish came true.
“One thing I want to ask you before I go,” he said, but it was a milder, easier thing. At least, he hoped it was. “Last night when you met the baby. You were so thrilled. And then all of a sudden . . . you . . . weren’t.”
“True.”
He leaned in silence for a few additional seconds, wondering if it would be right to ask more. As it turned out, he didn’t need to.
“At first I was just so taken by him,” she said, “and how perfect and innocent and vulnerable he is. And for a while that seemed only like a wonderful thing. And then I started to worry about the world into which he’s just been born. What will it do to him? How much will it take from him? Look how much it’s taken from him already, and before he could even so much as come out of his mother and look around to see what he’s gotten himself into.”
He waited, but she did not seem inclined to say more. He glanced at her clock radio and saw he didn’t have a lot of time to spare. Besides, nothing he could say would be any more optimistic than her assessment.
“Okay,” he said. “You just rest. I’ll come by later and tell you how it went.”
“Ms. Hatfield,” the defense attorney said to his client, “will you please explain to the jury why you turn off your hearing aids when you’re walking on the street?”
It was nearly three hours into the morning court session. Almost the whole session so far had consisted of the defendant testifying, questioned by her own attorney.
Raymond looked down at his notes and realized he hadn’t typed much. Because she hadn’t said much. Granted, she had spoken many, many words. But in Raymond’s mind they didn’t seem to add up to anything.
Raymond felt he could sum up the whole morning session in just a sentence or two.
Look at me; I’m a nice person. I’m just like you.
But it would have felt weird to type that in his notes. Besides, he didn’t think their campaign was working. She was nothing like him, and he didn’t think she was a nice person. She was defensive. That was all he could see or feel. Defensiveness.
He looked up at her face in that split second before she spoke again. She had big, round cheeks. Plump. They seemed a strange contrast to her nose and chin, which were sharp. Her brown eyes were small and set strangely close together.
“Believe me, if you wore hearing aids, you’d understand. They amplify background noises. It’s very irritating. It’s grating, you know?”
“Okay,” her attorney said. “I think we understand. No more questions.”
Raymond thought it was a weird place to end the testimony. He wasn’t sure what the defense attorney felt he had just accomplished.
He typed a few quick notes, then looked up to see the prosecutor approach the witness stand and the defendant.
“I’m not at all sure I do understand,” he said. “So I’d like to clarify this, in case the jury is confused as well.”
“What don’t you understand?” she asked.
Defensive.