She said, “But they wanted every detail of the timeline, and it’s like, I don’t even remember what happened. I remember what I told you. I remember what I remember remembering.”
I’d been involved in enough debriefings before my sequestration that I wasn’t surprised; the state was trying to shore up the original timeline of the night, the one that had suggested it wasn’t worth looking into people like you or Robbie. And Sakina, while she’d been the first to contact me and volunteer that she remembered Thalia drinking, while she’d appeared on the podcast and said she’d harbored private doubts for years about Omar’s conviction, had never changed any details of the night.
She put a hand on my arm, suddenly serious, leaning close. “They told me I could get recalled, and I’m thinking, I’m not flying all the way home to Seattle just to turn around. I’ll take a few days out here. But now I’m learning, okay, they could recall me weeks from now. So I’ll go home, but first I’m driving down to Philly to see my cousin. Also”—she raised her wineglass—“vacation, am I right? Let Darius deal with sixth grade math homework.”
I wanted to grill her about what else had come up on the stand—but my asking questions, rather than listening as she rambled drunk, would be a step further down the road of verboten witness behavior. Luckily, she pivoted to asking about my kids. She pulled out her phone to show me new pictures of her daughter, Ava, who’d been born the same day as Leo, saying we were going to set them up, we’d send them both to Granby and they could be Homecoming dates. I would never in a million years send my kids to Granby. Among other things, while fourteen had seemed a reasonable age for me to leave home, it seemed unfathomably young for Leo, who was only three years from fourteen and still slept with his bed full of LEGOs.
She started saying something about Ava’s dance teacher, and then she was waving over my shoulder and the film skipped and Mike Stiles loomed above us, grinning down. He’d apparently been here and gone outside and come back. This was his half-drunk beer in front of me. I was too shocked to be self-conscious. We hugged like old friends, because we were. You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.
“He’s not even testifying!” Sakina announced, which I already knew. Mike didn’t remember seeing Thalia drink backstage. If we were lucky enough to get a retrial, he’d be a great witness, though. He had come around fully, and publicly, to the idea of Omar’s investigation and original trial being botched; he’d written about the case on his academic blog.
Mike sat on the other side of me. I pulled my stool back from the bar, putting us into a triangle. He had the wild eyebrows of an aging man, long gray strands emerging from the dark ones in a way that oddly suited him. His brow ridge, the one Fran used to call Neanderthal, was now marked by a deep skin crease. But he looked somehow cheesy overall, too handsome to take seriously. At some point in my twenties, I’d outgrown my attraction to symmetry. I decided that Mike was more attractive for being older, but less attractive for being, still, someone out of a tooth-whitening ad.
He said, “My nephew’s a freshman now. Lola’s little brother. So I’m partly up visiting him, but also Serenho’s getting in tomorrow, and he’ll need distracting.”
Sakina said, “He’s testifying? For the defense?” I wanted to shush her. I glanced back toward the dining room.
“I guess he’s on the list.” Mike looked somber, as if he were speaking at his friend’s funeral. “They’re gonna get him up there and make him look like a suspect. What it is, he did that interview where he said Thalia wasn’t on drugs, and they mostly want him to repeat that, because the drug thing was part of the state’s whole theory. But you know what’ll happen once he’s on the stand.”
The interview hadn’t happened on Britt and Alder’s podcast but an episode of a much sleeker, more long-standing one, one that was able to pay him substantially for his appearance. He talked for only five minutes, and mostly said bland, predictable things, but he stated emphatically that Thalia had never done drugs, not even pot. “I don’t know where that idea came from,” he said, and my stomach went on a short roller-coaster ride. If he’d paid attention to our podcast, he’d have heard me blaming myself for the detail. “Listen, I can say this now, in 2020. I tried! I tried to get her to smoke a little pot. She was not interested. So I don’t think that was her relationship with Omar. I don’t think she had a relationship with Omar at all. I think that was all a fantasy in his mind. And when she wouldn’t play along, he snapped.”
I kept waiting for my memory of Thalia circling the dumpsters to lock into place, to fit with some adult knowledge I’d gained, but it remained a mystery. She might have been sleepwalking. She might have accidentally thrown something out—her retainer, a term paper—and been working up the courage to jump in and dig it out. She might have been waiting for you. Regardless: I’d misread the scene as dramatically as Bendt Jensen had misunderstood the fireflies.
I said, “That’s the main reason he’s up there, the drug thing. They’re not putting him on trial. Plus to show no one else was investigated.”
“Sure,” Mike said. “Sure.” He noticed the bread basket we’d brought from my table and folded a large slice of baguette impressively into his mouth.
Mike was an interesting case study: someone with a career’s worth of experience in human rights, who still couldn’t quite handle justice if it would affect his buddy.
Not that I was callous about the fallout for Robbie. It was a source of nagging guilt for me that in reopening the case, we’d brought him the attention he never got the first time around, pre-internet. Colleagues and friends would now be looking at him at least with pity, if not unfair suspicion. I didn’t want to imagine what people might say to his kids. There was a website, not terribly active, called RobbieSerenhoIsGuilty.com. Dane Rubra had fixated most recently on the theory of both Robbie and Thalia leaving their dorms in the middle of the night to drink, Thalia’s time of death being incorrect, Robbie having a ’roid rage issue. Which was ridiculous, because coke and pot maybe, but Robbie Serenho was not on steroids. He’d been all wiry muscle, designed for flying downhill.
“Is he doing okay?” I asked.
Mike just shrugged.
“Show me a picture of your nephew,” I said, and he spent a minute on his phone, then showed me a boy who looked exactly like himself at fourteen, only a bit like Lola, too, foggy-eyed, thin-lipped.
I said, “He’s gonna break some hearts.”
I once told a male friend that an army photo of his grandfather, back when he’d looked just like my friend, was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. I once told a writer that I had a crush on his (clearly autobiographical) main character. I think of this as oblique flirting, and it works surprisingly well. To be clear, I wasn’t coming on to Mike Stiles, exactly. I was more demonstrating—on animal instinct—the fact that I could. It was a display of dominance. I was now a person who could amuse myself by flirting with him, or not, as I saw fit.
It was also part of my broader attempt to steer the conversation away from the hearing, but we were back on it just moments later, Sakina saying that if things took as long in medicine as they did in law, all her patients would die.
“I know they have to do things right,” she said, “but I have to do things right at three in the morning sometimes. We don’t just wait for the perfect moment. Like, sorry, lady, I can’t give you a C-section for two more months because we need this paperwork first.”
“The wheels of justice—” Mike started, far too sincerely.
“The wheels of justice came off the wagon a long time ago,” I said.
He laughed, sort of. He said, “Were you always funny?”