13 1/2 (4 page)

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Authors: Nevada Barr

BOOK: 13 1/2
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The muttering in the courthouse dried up. Nobody was even breathing. Time stopped, and the people were hanging on the second hand, wondering if the clock was going to work ever again. Dylan wasn’t breathing either. He was waiting to die. Not the good kind where everything is over, but to be killed inside.
Rich balanced himself against the rail so he could stand on his bad leg, reached out both arms, and said, “Brother.”
The sere, cinder-lined core of Dylan filled with warm liquid. He was melting from the inside out. Time flowed backward. He hurtled from eleven, to eight, to six. A little boy threw his arms around his big brother’s neck and bawled like a baby. Rich didn’t have to be so good to him.
Rich was crying too.
People in the courthouse didn’t know what kind of noise to make. Their murmuring fattened up with awe and pity, then morphed into white-hot fury. Dylan smeared the tears and snot from his face into the crook of his arm as the sound grew into the feral growl of a mob working up to a lynching. Except he was eleven. So they couldn’t even enjoy being mad at him. He was a little kid. They had to pretend to be sad at the same time.
Rich fell back into his wheelchair. Mrs. Eisenhart, Dylan’s court-appointed attorney, pulled him from the rail. The judge was pounding his gavel for quiet.
They were all mad for Rich, because he wouldn’t be mad for himself. They hated Dylan. They needn’t have bothered; he hated himself more than they ever could.
He sat down. Mrs. Eisenhart had brought him the suit and tie his mom got for Lena’s baptism. He’d been nine then, and the suit was too small. He squirmed trying to get the crotch to stop crawling up his butt.
Mrs. Eisenhart kicked him under the table. Rich was being sworn in; Dylan forgot about wedgies.
The other lawyer, the one against Dylan, began asking questions. Rich didn’t want to answer, but he’d sworn on the Bible and had to. He hadn’t seen Dylan do anything. He insisted on that. He’d been next door necking with Vondra Werner. When Rich said that, he looked at Dylan and kind of shrugged.
Dylan turned around with a great big, sheepish grin plastered on his face, looking to see what his mom and dad thought of
that.
Men in the courthouse were smiling; when they saw his face the smiles whispered out, leaving only the scratching sound of dead leaves in the air. His big old grin brought the undergrowl back into the ambient noise.
The parched silence, the sudden remembering that his parents weren’t there, froze Dylan’s smile in a creepy kind of way. Like a supervillain had zapped him with an ice ray. Flash bulbs popped. “Butcher Boy,” one of the newspaper reporters whispered, and a bunch of them scribbled in their notepads.
Mrs. Eisenhart closed a sharp-nailed hand on his shoulder and turned him back toward the judge.
Rich told the jury, the judge, and the lawyers that he’d come home and found Dylan drenched in blood. He’d tried to get the axe away from him, and Dylan had nearly hacked his leg off. Thinking Dylan was possessed, or might hurt himself, or was sick, Rich, even though he was bleeding to death, got the axe away from him and bonked him on the head. Then Rich had passed out and didn’t remember anything until he woke up at the Mayo. That was it—the whole story.
The prosecutor made Rich tell it different ways. He tried to make him add to it, say he saw things he didn’t, but Rich wouldn’t do it. Everybody was listening so hard Dylan could feel his brother’s words being sucked past his ears into the gallery.
No one listened harder than he did. Mrs. Eisenhart had told him the story when she’d rehearsed him for the trial—it wasn’t at all like on television; the lawyers were supposed to tell each other what they were going to say and do and not surprise the other guy; but it was totally different hearing it from his brother. When Rich said it, Dylan finally believed. Until then he thought he didn’t remember it because it didn’t happen.
It happened.
This hit him like the axe had—a slam into his head that scrambled his brain. Mrs. Eisenhart kicked him again. She didn’t like him any more than anybody else did.
It had happened. He’d gotten hold of his dad’s axe, and it had happened.
He stared down at the table he and his lawyer were sitting behind. It started to spin and tip like the deck of a boat in a windstorm. Dylan grabbed one edge to keep from smashing his face against the tossing wood surface. With his other hand he took hold of the seat of his chair lest he be pitched onto the floor.
“I tried to kill my brother with Daddy’s axe,” he whispered. This time Mrs. Eisenhart’s kick hurt. He guessed he hadn’t spoken loud enough for anyone else to hear because nobody was looking at him. The words hadn’t been a confession; he’d said them to see if it would make him remember. Because he didn’t. He didn’t remember a thing. Not one thing after his mother had put him to bed.
He’d told them that over and over, but even his own lawyer didn’t believe him. When she got to talk, she argued that people suffering head injuries from accidents often couldn’t remember events that happened immediately before the trauma, that the blow had given Dylan a severe concussion, that he’d been in intensive care, and that, since the incident, he suffered severe headaches.
Nobody felt sorry for him; Dylan didn’t even feel sorry for himself. He’d tried to kill his brother.
Rich was on the stand for over an hour. Talking so long cost him. Lines of pain aged his face. During the whole thing, even when the prosecutor pushed, Rich refused to say anything bad about Dylan. Looking straight at the jury the way Mrs. Eisenhart told Dylan he should if she decided to put him on the stand, Rich told them that Dylan never hurt anybody, didn’t hit or pinch or call other kids names, minded his mother and father, was kind and protective of Lena, their thirty-month-old sister, and brought home injured animals to take care of. The more good he told them, the less the jury believed it. It didn’t even sound like Rich believed it himself.
When the prosecutor was finished, Mrs. Eisenhart didn’t ask Rich a single question. As he was being wheeled out, Rich whispered, “Hang in there, brother,” and gave Dylan a thumbs-up. Dylan didn’t respond; he knew if he so much as nodded he would be six years old again, bawling like a baby.
After Rich testified, things in the courtroom pretty much stopped making sense for Dylan. People came and went without reason. Colors got brighter and brighter until Dylan had to squint to keep them out. Voices were superloud. He could smell things with a dog’s nose: traces of his lawyer’s perfume would choke him; the stink of an old cigarette on somebody behind them would make him sick to his stomach. The walls crept in, making the room smaller.
This whole-world cacophony made him crazy.
Crazier
.
One day the prosecutor called Vondra Werner. Dylan pulled hard on the places where his brain was being sucked out of shape so he could pay attention. Vondra and her family had only lived next door six months or so, but she was always around, snooping and trying to talk to Rich. Dylan didn’t think she knew he existed.
“Pink, of course,” Mrs. Eisenhart hissed.
Vondra had on a pink dress. She looked pretty, shy, and nice. Dylan didn’t know why that made his lawyer mad. In a low voice, Vondra told everybody how she and Rich had been together. Except she didn’t say they were necking; she said they were “making love.”
When it was her turn Mrs. Eisenhart made Vondra tell how she was always watching, and following Rich around, and maybe was jealous of his family, and maybe didn’t like Dylan. Dylan thought for a minute the lawyer was going to get Vondra to break down like Perry Mason got confessions at the end of the show, and Vondra’d confess she’d done everything.
Then the lawyer said, “Richard didn’t like you spying; Mrs. Raines didn’t like you watching.” Vondra went white like Casper the Friendly Ghost.
“Richard loves me,” she said. “Mrs. Raines didn’t like
him
.” She pointed to where Dylan sat. “I overheard her once saying he did things that scared her.”
Panic flooded Dylan, filled his brain until there wasn’t room for anything else. People’s lips would move but he wouldn’t hear anything—or the words made no sense. They could have been speaking Chinese for all he knew.
Except he knew he was
supposed
to understand.
Terror sharpened, began cutting the inside of his skull; he could feel it knife into the bone. Then he could no longer see, not like he should have been seeing. Lights would grow dimmer or brighter, except they didn’t. Nobody else saw them do it. Walls, especially pale walls, changed color from white, to pink, to grey. Faces mutated subtly to become frightening.
The fifth or sixth day of the trial, Dylan woke up too scared to look into the mirror. His reflection might melt, become monstrous, and his mind would snap, the kind of crazy snap that showed and got people stuck in rubber rooms with canvas coats that tied in the back. Dylan knew he couldn’t be shut up all by himself, all
in
himself. He had to seem okay.
At least, okay for a monster.
He shut down. He moved hardly at all, then carefully, robotically, nothing flapping or wriggling out of control. Food tasted like sawdust. It stuck in his throat halfway down, a glob of paste. He never looked at his plate. If he looked too long, the noodles or whatever might begin to writhe. He ate to stay alive, and he wasn’t truly committed even to that. The people who made his meals, the people who served them, they all hated him. They could poison the food or, worse, pee or spit on it.
“I don’t know what you think you’re proving with this stoic act you’ve started. You’re not doing yourself any good,” Mrs. Eisenhart said. “People look at you and see indifference. You won’t get the death sentence. I’m a better lawyer than that, and, besides, nobody likes to kill kids, but playing Marble Man is hurting you.”
Dylan knew she was right. He was eleven, not stupid. If he let the jury and the judge see his pain, they might take pity on him. Pity might lead to forgiveness. He couldn’t hope for the good Bible kind where the Prodigal Son is loved, but there might be a version of “forgiveness lite,” where they could tell themselves he was redeemable.
“There’s an old Chinese proverb,” Mrs. Eisenhart said. “You keep on the way you’re going, and eventually you’ll get where you’re headed. You’re a smart boy; you know where that is.”
When he didn’t respond, she dug newspapers out of her briefcase and spread them on the table between them. On the front pages there were photos of him locked in his panic catatonia. “Butcher Boy Shows No Remorse.” That was the headline on the tabloid. The respectable paper was more circumspect but the message was the same.
“Have it your way,” Mrs. Eisenhart said abruptly. Leaving the papers for him to enjoy, she snapped her briefcase shut and stalked away, her high-heeled shoes noisy on the linoleum. At the door she turned back and Dylan wondered if she watched that new show
Columbo
and was doing that almost-gone-wait-one-more-zinger move. “You’re killing me,” she said. She didn’t even see why that was funny.
Dylan knew he was killing his chance of any kind of leniency. And he knew he could not show them his pain. Should the least tiny little droplet of it leak out it would breach the dam; the trickle would become a stream, and the stream, a flood. He would be washed away in it.
The last day of the trial a cop took the stand and told the jury Dylan had gone insane and peed in his pants rather than look at what he’d done. He told them how Dylan had laughed. Then two more cops repeated the story. Dylan sort of remembered doing that, but it wasn’t the way they said it was.
When the last cop was telling how Rich nearly died from the hack job on his leg and how Dylan had laughed, Dylan shut down his ears. It was too weird. Somebody else did all those things, not Dylan. A monster got in. Maybe Rich was protecting that monster. His
girlfriend.
Vondra was always peeking out the windows at them and making up excuses to come by. Maybe she was psycho.
Maybe he was.
Voices washed around him as he sat straight and stiff and stared at the tabletop and tried to remember stuff—not the bad stuff—just stuff. Searching his mind, looking way back into the dark places where dead-and-over things were stored, he saw only fog, thick and white the way fog was from the machines they used in high school plays. But he wasn’t going to go to high school. Even a moron could figure that out.
That afternoon the trial ended. “Dylan, the judge asked you a question!” Mrs. Eisenhart’s voice dragged him out of himself. When she called him, he was seeing a picture in his mind of the butterfly kiss his mom had given him that last night, the tiny gold cross she always wore cool on his cheek. It made him smile.
“Look at him! He’s grinning!” a whisper hissed loud in the courtroom.
“Huh?” It took him longer than it should have to make sense of what she’d said. He sounded retarded.
“We are going into the sentencing phase now. Judge Farnsworth wants to know if you want to say anything in your own behalf.”
Then he did a stupid thing. He meant to ask if the jury had found him guilty. He meant to say, “I’m guilty?” with the end of the sentence going up, so everybody would know it was a question. What came out was, “I’m guilty.”

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