“Just don’t.”
Marsha clicks the doors open and puts her heeled feet on the ground. I open my own backseat door and place my feet on the asphalt, pulling myself up. I haven’t walked in anything but sneakers in weeks and it’s like my feet have forgotten how to step delicately, the shoes so slippery and new. At first, the only thing I hear is the occasional whoosh of cars behind us, the lake’s salt winding its way up the county courthouse steps with us, now lined in people dressed in half-business, half-casual, cameras out. I hear my name like a chorus of bees with a few distinct words coming through.
“Ms. Johnson, do you have a moment?”
“Do you have hopes for the outcome of the grand jury?”
Their voices are high-pitched and squeaky, always saying something, but none of it really for me. They want it for the camera. They want it for the quick news segment that never extends past city limits. I focus every muscle on the walk up the steps, the back of Marsha’s head, her ponytail swinging. She pulls the door to the courthouse open and I shiver in the breeze, slide inside, let it thud behind me. Marsha keeps walking, but I stop. I guess she hears my shoes stop tapping on the marble floor because she turns around and saunters back to me.
“What’s wrong?” She looks at me, hip jutted.
“They not following us in here?”
“They know there will be legal ramifications if they try to enter and broadcast that footage. You’re safe.”
I roll my eyes, as if safety was ever enough of a possibility to be in question. The courthouse is too big to hold us. Wood and marble, paneling and carvings in ceilings that aren’t even reachable with the tallest ladder.
Marsha follows my gaze up, sighs. “I need you to be ready for this. Are you?”
I rub my nails across my forearm, jagged and scratching. “I guess.”
Marsha don’t have time for my shit, twists back around on her heel, and starts strutting. Down the hallway. Marble and echoes following us, shivers up my legs, thighs rubbing in the slick frame of a dress that could never be mine. We’re at least five feet apart at this point and she isn’t slowing down for me anytime soon, instead quickens her pace.
We’re at the door, a security guard standing in front of it. I know this must be the one, the walls that hide everything they been telling me to fear, because Marsha, steel-framed and glowing, pauses. She turns to look back at me and I catch her eyes for a moment, see the pupils give way to just the tiniest remnants of Marsha as a child, Marsha small like me.
“I wish I could go in with you, but you know I can’t. If you need me, you can ask for me and they’ll allow you to come out here for legal counsel.”
I don’t expect it, but my eyes swell with tears and I don’t want to leave her.
“You’re going to be just fine.”
Marsha’s hand is on my back, rubbing it, and then pushing me toward the door. I look back at her, but she’s not moving. After so many hours practicing, I can’t imagine looking out at the room and not seeing her face. I stare at the wooden arches, the guard stepping aside so I can lift my hand to the knob and pull it open.
I guess I expected some sort of chorus, a chaotic rumble or something. Instead, the doors give way to silence punctuated by a single cough. The room is close to empty, at least it looks empty since the back three rows are vacant. As I walk down the aisle, the faces in the front two rows become recognizable, if not for their owners, then for their familiarity. Man beside man, hollow cheeks, patchy noses, woman placed like a divider between them, legs crossed. All pasty and sun-deprived. Bet they’ve never felt the heat like I have.
At the end of the front row, two girls sit, huddled under sweatshirts that swallow them whole, leaving only their bare legs exposed. The girls are Lexi’s type of skittish, a young that reveals itself without even a word. My eyes linger on them for a moment, how they sit on the left side of the aisle with all the uniforms and suits. We’re always out of place. I’m not sure where to sit, but then I see the back of Sandra’s head, and I’m relieved. I sit on the right side of the aisle, which is close to empty besides her and a couple men with their heads down. She doesn’t have her purple suit today, but she is colorful and moonlit in burgundy.
Beside her now, I don’t know if I should cross my legs or not. I swing one over the other, but it feels wrong, the way everything points straight to my knees, trails up my thighs where the dress gives way to skin. I uncross them. Ain’t no right way to be in here, under lights that are more white than lights should be, like they overcompensated and now they’re blinding.
Sandra hasn’t looked at me yet but she reaches over and squeezes my hand.
“Who are they?” I whisper to her, nodding my head toward the girls across the aisle.
Still not looking in my direction, Sandra responds, “My guess is they’re witnesses, like you.”
“They done it to them too?”
“I don’t know, but from the way they’re dressed, they’re probably here to discredit your story, put you in a box with them, say you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe they just don’t got nothing else to wear.”
“The lawyers who called them here do.” Sandra stares down at her legal pad. “Probably hired by Talbot or someone working with Talbot to prep them.”
My knee is shaking now. “I don’t even know them. How they gonna say shit about me?”
“This city’s not known for its ethics.”
“So they paid them to talk shit about me?”
Sandra, who has continued to stare straight down, tilts her head just enough to lock eyes with me. In a low, measured voice, she says, “You worry about you. This is for you and your brother and girls who need to take that money because they don’t know another way to survive. You hear me?”
She straightens her head again and I nod, though she probably can’t see it. For a moment there, I really believed she was some incarnation of the mother I used to have, some piece of Mama revitalized.
There’s a large clock on the wall directly above where the judge is seated and, just as it strikes nine, the whole room quiets. Feels like I’ve entered a Judge Judy scene, the judge slamming the gavel down with three bangs. I half expect her to call out Order in the court but she doesn’t and next thing I know she’s talking in legal speech and a man is standing, responding. The whole exchange is alien to me and I don’t know what’s going on until Sandra leans toward me and whispers.
“One of the witnesses failed to appear.”
“Who?”
“An officer.”
“Good,” I scoff.
Sandra shakes her head. “I don’t think so. It sounds like he was the only one corroborating your story.”
“Why would any of them do that?”
“Decency, I guess.” Sandra starts to crack a smile that never makes it to her mouth, leaves only the slightest dimple in her left cheek.
I don’t think that’s it, though. Not that none of them are decent, just that decency has never provided enough to unbury their egos. I think it’s just how time works. A man’s crescent will always catch up with him. The way I seen Marcus’s moon chest recede so far I thought it was dark in there. The way I’m seeing it come out now, slowly, but I know it’ll be full again. That’s the only reason any of the cops would have tried to save me: they got their moon back.