So when she said what she did in the parking lot, I hunkered down and refused to say anything more. She didn’t need or want a response. She screwed the lid back on her water bottle and turned around. After she left, I stayed in the parking lot until a bailiff or someone (my mom?) came to get me. I stood in the sun, which made my skin itch, made my face feel rigid and thick like it was stretched over my eyes, making it hard to see. I stood there and listened to the chainsaw as it brought down someone’s bad tree: first the swishy leafy parts, then the clattering branch work, and finally the trunk in a thump.
Nobody believes you when you talk about happiness Patra told me once.
For months, I’d watched her blow into Paul’s soup and kiss his perfect half-moon eyebrows. I’d watched her rush out in the rain before dinner, gather up books he had left by the lake, come back in dripping, elated. Run around the house rubbing her hands, trying to warm up again. Sing to him. Sing to us. I’d watched her slide in her socks from one side of the kitchen to the other, from counter to island, filling plates, stirring pots, pushing the frizz of her hair from her face with her hands. And all that time, Paul had been fine. He was fine: he was better than that even. Hadn’t Patra broken granola bars into bits to look like kibble, so he could eat like cats? Hadn’t she warmed his apple juice in the microwave once, because he said it was too cold, it hurt his teeth? He was so entirely and evidently cherished: that’s the truth. I could have said all that when I had my chance. I wanted to—I planned on it—but didn’t.
Here’s what I said on the stand when I was asked what Patra had done for her son: nothing.
She did nothing.
19
I REMEMBER THERE WAS THIS BIG FADED MURAL IN THE COURTHOUSE HALLWAY. It showed an Indian with a white guy in a canoe, both in chocolaty furs, both pointing into the woods at a bear on the shore. There were green trees and white fluffy clouds—everything nice and peaceful. You know, everybody getting along. But as I was leaving the courthouse that day with my mom, as we were walking out, I noticed the perspective on the mural in the hallway was a little off. The white guy was actually pointing at the bear’s butt, and the Indian had a pointing arm but not another one, and the bear appeared to be levitating slightly. His paws were not quite on the ground, and he looked unsurprised to be floating off into the trees like that, bored and resigned to it, maybe, and also sort of terrifying.
I didn’t know whether to push or pull the door, couldn’t find the handle at first.
“Are you coming?” my mother asked, as I floated outside.
Somehow I found my way down the marble steps. Somehow I got myself and my dress back in the hot truck, and we were on the road again. The pickup was on loan from a church acquaintance of my mother’s, someone who’d heard about the trial and wanted to show the difference between true Christians and false ones. It had Mr. Yuk stickers in a line across the dashboard, a dentist-office smell from the air freshener that spun from the rearview mirror. My mother could only get her window crank to work by leaning into it with her whole body, and even then she could only slide the glass down a crack.
She focused exclusively on shifting gears in the busy streets near downtown. She had recently renewed her license and was a conscientious stopper at all the signs, a silent and focused merger onto the highway. But then, when we hit the easy flat of Route 10, when the traffic vanished and woods returned, she started easing her way from subject to subject. The heat. The judge’s drawl. The yellow toilet in the ladies’ room. Mrs. Gardner’s sweater. She didn’t know why anyone would wear a sweater in August. It bothered her for some reason. She kept glancing at me as she spoke, fishing for strands of her hair that had blown out the window crack. “I mean, who would wake up and think, hey, it’s ninety degrees, I should go get my cardigan?”
She looked at me across the cab, where I was sort of slumped against the far door.
“Earth to Madeline,” she said.
Earth to me. Earth to me, I thought.
I was watching the way shadows and sun curtained the black road in front of us, the way their movement seemed to make the pavement undulate as we drove over it. I was wondering if the highway tar on the shoulder was actually melting or just seeming to melt, if the little rodents and insects scrambling across would get stuck in the mess, if it was a dangerous place for them to be. I was mentally warning them all away, the toads and the grasshoppers, and even as I was doing that, even as I was creating a force field on both sides of the highway with my mind, I could sense the appeal in my mother’s glance, the way it was almost physically painful for her to have to endure my silence now.