“Oh my God,” I had whispered, my heart awash in joy. I looked down at Piper, who was crying, and it was my turn to squeeze her hand.
We took Gabrielle home with us the next morning, after Piper’s parents stopped by the hospital to see the baby. As I drove our precious new cargo through the city streets, I felt an unfamiliar sense of fear—the first of many moments of new-baby terror I would experience over the next month. Gabrielle was so tiny and looked so fragile to me that I held my breath the first fifty times I held her. Piper laughed at my obvious trepidation.
“You’re not going to break her,” she’d say.
“Of course not,” I would agree, but I continued to handle Gabby like a pack of nitroglycerin.
During the early days of Gabby’s life, Piper and I spent hours next to Gabby’s crib, watching the gentle rhythm of her breathing, overwhelmed by the new life we’d created.
I remember one afternoon, sitting there, stroking her thick black hair and letting my mind carry us both into the future where Gabrielle’s life would unfold. I envisioned her as a toddler, crawling along the floor looking for new things to touch and lift and put into her mouth. I saw her walking between Piper and me, looking up at us, holding our hands as we escorted her to the bus stop for her first day of kindergarten. I saw Gabby sitting in fifth grade, drawing hearts and writing the name of some boy she had a crush on over and over again inside the cover of her notebook. I saw her, gawky and long-legged, crying on her bed as a teenager. I saw her walking next to me down the aisle as I steeled myself to hand her off to a better man. And I saw her in a hospital bed, cradling her own firstborn child.
Jennifer Yamura’s father must have had the same experience with his own daughter, the same hopes and visions for her future. A future that ended in a pool of blood in a dark basement. Thinking this cuts me to the bone.
8
TUESDAY, JULY 10; FRIDAY, JULY 20; THURSDAY, JULY 26; WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1
Three weeks pass. The Hanson case is pushed off the front pages by other, equally sad stories: a local congressman faces corruption charges while his son is convicted on twenty-two counts of bank and tax fraud; a local man is on trial for allegedly shooting his stepdaughter and then videotaping himself having sex with her corpse.
On a Tuesday in the second week of July, I get to argue the Justin Bauer case before the state supreme court. It’s been said of Pennsylvania that it’s made up of Pittsburgh on the west end, Philadelphia on the east, and Alabama in the middle. Geographically, most of the state is populated by staunch conservatives who hold a dim view of the rights of criminal defendants, a view historically well represented by the justices elected to our state’s supreme court. The panel that faces me now, however, gives me reason for optimism. Last year, two of our Republican justices were forced off the bench when the state attorney general released copies of pornographic and misogynistic e-mails exchanged by the justices and members of law enforcement. They were replaced by two Democrats who both began their careers as criminal-defense attorneys.
From the get-go, the court’s questioning makes clear that most of the justices are as convinced as I am of the ineptitude of Justin Bauer’s trial attorney. But that’s not enough. I have to show that the trial attorney’s ineptitude so undermined the truth-determining process that no reliable adjudication of guilt or innocence could have taken place. In other words, I have to convince the justices that, were it not for the trial attorney’s blunders, there would have been a good chance Justin would not have been convicted.
It’s a high hurdle.
The rules of appellate procedure do not require the defendant’s presence in the courtroom during oral argument. But I have brought Justin nonetheless—and Celine as well. Not because I expect they’ll understand the nuances of my legal argument, but because I want them to see the passion with which I present their side. Justin was let down by his former attorney, and I believe it’s imperative that he and his mother witness a lawyer actually fighting like hell for them. They’re owed at least that.
The argument goes as I expect. The justices are tough on both sides but more on me than the prosecution. Still, I hear in their questions an openness that I haven’t come across in a long while. After the hearing, I walk Celine into the hall. She grills me on the questioning, wanting to know why the judges were pressing me so hard. I do my best to explain, wishing the law weren’t so obtuse. In the end, all I can do is leave her with a sense of guarded optimism and, hopefully, the feeling that, finally, the law is hearing her and her son.
The next two weeks bring a heat wave. Day after day of high humidity and ninety-degree temperatures require me to change shirts twice a day. The heat makes me yearn for the beach. Makes me remember how, when we were first married, Piper and I used to bolt out of Center City every Friday afternoon in the summers and head to Cape May, where we’d rent a room in a bed-and-breakfast.
The first time we’d gone to the beach together was when we’d just started dating.
“Next to the museum, this is my favorite place,” Piper told me as we walked the broad sand beach toward the lighthouse. “When I look out at the ocean, at all that open space, it feels like time, too, expands. That the pace of everything slows down. And if I stop and stand here facing the ocean”—Piper continued, doing so—“and take a deep breath . . . it feels like the whole world is inhaling with me. And all the pressures of the world melt away.”
Piper turned to me when she said this. She smiled when she finished and, in that instant, her beauty struck me. It physically struck me. The shimmering blonde of her hair as it danced around her tiny ears in the balmy sea breeze. The sapphire of her smiling eyes. Her rose-pink lips. Her fine jawline. The way she tilted her head ever so slightly to the left.
I’m not sure how long we stood there, facing each other, but I’m sure Piper could see how I was looking at her.
“Have you ever stayed at a bed-and-breakfast?” she asked then, smiling in a very different way than before.
A couple of hours later, we lay beneath the sheets on a thick mattress on a creaky brass bed on the wood-plank second floor of a bed-and-breakfast on Gurney Street. Our lovemaking had been gentle, sweet, almost ethereal—until the passion had overtaken us. Now, in the afterglow, the pace of the world had slowed down again. Piper’s head was nestled under my arm as we both lay still. In the distance, I heard the calm sea waves roll in to caress the sand. Inside, the only sounds were the rhythms of our breathing.
“And all the pressures of my world melt away,” I said. But Piper didn’t hear me. She was asleep. So I kissed the top of her head and told her I loved her.