Jane Doe January (14 page)

Little, interesting details about Fryar's life may continue to pop up. I'll notice them, sure, and continue to think about the ones that I already have, but the urge to quest for more and more seems to be now satisfied.

Now with my head out of the past, I continue to obsess about the present and immediate future. I haven't yet canceled anything. Evan had told me only that the defense intends to request postponement. I'm still waiting to hear if that request has been officially granted, and what the new date will be.

No word from Evan at all yesterday or yet today. I assume that he's working to get more information and that he'll tell me as soon as he has any. I trust him.

E-mailing me from the plane had been a simple gesture that has earned him a great deal of leeway from me. I also appreciate that he e-mailed when he had only partial information. Too many people use waiting for complete knowledge as an excuse for putting off contact; I'd always rather be told part of something than nothing at all.

I wonder if he knows that I'm hopeful of an e-mail from him literally every minute. Fryar and his defense attorney have a plan, or at least hopes and contingencies. I want to know what they are.

S. is now as tall as me. Up until this week, I've been able to beat him at arm wrestling at least half the time, and always put up a good fight; now he conquers me easily, both of us laughing in astonishment, and he asks to try again every day. He's proud to have become stronger than me. It's amazing how naturally it happened, without his even trying. With very little effort, just by growing, boys become powerful.

I meet John at a pâtisserie for breakfast, and we have toast with jam and expensive coffees. I tell him about the Orange County papers, tempering my words whenever the waitress passes by too close. He reads the 1976 confession right there in front of me, and I get to reread it in the expressions on his face. It's a relief to share it.

Afterward, I write a letter to the policeman who took Fryar's statement in 1976, to ask if he remembers Fryar's state of mind. He's the same age as Fryar; both were just twenty-four then. Ten years after Fryar's confession, this officer was a captain and Newburgh's chief of detectives. That night in 1976, he was a sergeant working the desk. I assume that Fryar's eagerness would have been memorable.

I'm still waiting for Evan. I force myself to act patient, not by refraining from e-mailing him, but by e-mailing him politely and, at least on the surface, undemandingly. Demand, of course, is inherent in making repeated contact. Two e-mails in three days, today's asking to schedule a Skype call, may be too much, but it's the best that I can do.

I find it funny that I ever worried that I had played it too cool with Evan, and that he might not realize how invested I am. That's not a problem now.

Going by the original date, trial is supposed to begin in eighteen days; I'm meant to leave home for it (and the choir trip first) in eleven days. There's no word yet about the proposed delay.

There's nothing that Fryar could want that couldn't have been asked for weeks ago, without requiring any delay at all. They're letting him play with me.

Days pass busily. Sometimes being a parent means rushing out to get new shoes for suddenly bigger feet. Other times it means that, having gotten those new shoes, and having thrown together a cheap tuxedo out of school-uniform basics, and having packed up his score and timpani sticks, I get to spend a sunny afternoon in the
ruins of a Benedictine priory while S. rehearses Beethoven's Mass in C inside. He's the only minor in the orchestra, and so requires a parent nearby. W., hours away at home, finishes painting a model of a fighter jet with Gavin, who'll be leaving tomorrow morning on one of his monthly workweeks away.

It's Sunday. I can't expect to hear from Evan; he seems to stick to office hours. I'm trusting him less. I feel anxious. He's given me no hint of what's happening since Tuesday, not even if the postponement request has gone before the judge, or if he, Evan, is going to ask for any limits on the request at all. I've tried my best not to prod him again, but I must.

Because the priory is out of data range, my message doesn't go out until after midnight, on the orchestra bus home. Evan's reply is then waiting for me when I wake up. I'm alone in bed because Gavin had to disappear at dawn.

Postponement is set to be approved by a judge today, Monday. Refusal would give grounds for appeal of a future conviction, so there's no hope of the trial going ahead as scheduled. I scramble to organize a list of dates for Evan to work around to schedule the new trial. I list all of the details that I have to jump on, like rescheduling flights and canceling the hotel. Evan gives me his cell-phone number. I hoard it, saving it for a more desperate occasion. Just his extending it makes me feel a little bit protected again, a little bit looked after.

He explains in his e-mail that the three main reasons for a psych eval are insanity defense, which wouldn't make sense in our case because an evaluation now wouldn't prove insanity twenty-two years ago; competence to stand trial, which I hope we'll fight if Fryar tries to use it; and mitigation at sentencing, which, if it's true, will piss me the hell off. Sentencing for a June 3 trial would be more than three months away, ninety days after conviction, so postponement to prepare for that would be complete bullshit.

I hate Abigail the defense attorney now. I respect the adversarial system, and the way that defense attorneys, even for obviously guilty defendants, check the power of the prosecution and force them to earn their convictions. But I don't respect her lazy decision to do nothing for Fryar until the DNA report came in, a report that matches the previous reports and so imparts no new information. It's not as though anyone expected it to say anything different. If she ever thought that Fryar needed a psychiatric evaluation, she could have asked for one months ago when she was assigned the case. She waited till now either because she's lazy, or because she's letting Fryar manipulate her and use her to gum up the system and to hurt me. I would cross the street to get away from her. I would walk out of a room that had her in it.

I wish that there were some women on my side. I like all of the men who have been put around me, but it's sad that all of the powerful women involved are either for the other victim, like Aprill, or neutral, like the judge, or defending Fryar. Back in 1992, my doctor at the hospital was a woman. My college department head, who gave me time off without academic consequences, was a woman. I liked that. I don't need to be protected from men and I'm glad that that's not happening; I wouldn't want to replace Evan or Bill or Dan. I just wish that there were one or two women also on my side for the prosecution, just so that I wouldn't have to be wary of all of the women involved: wary of Abigail, who works for the enemy; wary of the judge, who doesn't punish near harshly enough; wary of Aprill, whose time I shouldn't be taking up.

The postponement is distressing because of more than just the wait. The worse thing will be the thinning out of my support. I can't expect people to keep caring for too long. After a while, instead of being news, the prosecution will become an eye-rolling annoyance to the people around me. I have to be careful of how much I let myself depend on anyone, or even mention it.

I'm overwhelmed.

Various friends have kindly offered to take my boys whenever I may need help, but the trouble is that when I'm in the middle of needing help, I find it difficult to ask. I can ask for help in advance, which is a lot of what I'd done to prepare for the now-delayed trial (and which I now have to unschedule), but it's harder to reach out from inside all of the feelings when they take me by surprise. Besides, if I tell the boys that they're suddenly being looked after today, they'll wonder why. I'm trying to protect them from knowing about my upset. Instead I tell them that I'm exhausted from the concert weekend, which is probably also true, and we hang out quietly together. The only time I cry is in the front seat of the taxi bringing us home from a music lesson and the park. Just tears, no shoulder hunching, no throat noises. The boys are in the back. They don't know. I don't think they know.

I miscarried between them, ten years ago. That day, Gavin had been out of the country, and S.'s part-time nanny was off taking a class. She sent her brother and boyfriend to swoop in while I went to the hospital. By the time I got home a few hours later, she was there, too. The three of them distracted toddler S. for literally days while Gavin journeyed home and I bled upstairs on hopeful, tearful bedrest.

For more than a year afterward, S. would frequently and spontaneously say, “Hey, Mom, remember that time when Delya and Olin and Chris all came over to play with me together? That was the best day of my life!” I would wince, but also feel proud. I'd wanted to protect him. Mission accomplished.

I have to constantly go back into whatever I've just written, e-mails and my diary, to correct some of my pronouns to “Fryar.” I don't like to write his name, so habitually deflect it with “he” and “him” and “his.” Then those words get tangled up with Evan and other men, so I have to go back in, adding “Fryar” all over the place, just to make things make sense.

First drafts reveal things. I remember sending an e-mail three years ago, when I was taking my turn tending my brother through cancer treatments. I was writing to our parents and siblings to keep everyone updated on his slow progress and wrote about his doctors, his feeding tube, his pain management. Before I hit send, I glanced the message over, and realized that I had literally skipped every instance of the word “pain.” I just didn't write it at all, the absence of which left sentences jumbled and dangling. I had to go back to force the word in, in each place that I'd so hopefully pretended that it didn't exist.

Evan would make a really good customer-service person if he ever finds being a lawyer too stressful. He's good at defusing complaints. Everything I say that I'm upset about, he agrees that I should feel that way and that he would, too, if he were me. It's calming to hear. He also tells me that I'm no bother. He's either genuinely kind, or at least kind enough to lie.

This is Skype call number three. Our first one had lasted an hour and fifteen minutes; the second forty-five minutes; this one just thirty-five. We're getting to know each other. We don't need to establish backstory anymore; we can focus on the present action, which in the case of the legal profession is achingly slow.

As expected, the judge has officially granted the postponement. Evan further clarifies that denying the request for psychiatric evaluation would have been a “reversible error,” meaning that everything that would have come after such a denial, even a whole trial, could have then been made as if it had never happened if the defense were to appeal that original denial. The judge had had to say yes. “Psychiatric evaluation” are magic words for postponement.

I've given Evan windows of dates for the rest of the year, only dates that Bill is available, too. I'm not going into court without him.

If I were geographically closer, Evan says, they wouldn't have can
celed June 3 yet, not until a week before. After all, maybe the psych eval will happen fast. Maybe it'll get done in time. But, because of my distance, they're canceling now, so that I have time to change my plans.

I ask if we'll be countering whatever the results of the evaluation are with an expert of our own, but it turns out that the doctor won't be hired by the defense. The evaluation will be neutral, performed by the jail's own psychiatrist, who will put Fryar at the end of his or her list once the court order is given. Then the doctor will work down the list and get to Fryar eventually. Evan has no sense of when that might actually happen.

The defense has not yet shown their hand regarding the purpose of this. If it's in the hope of declaring incompetence, Evan says that everything could get postponed again while Fryar gets put into a mental hospital until competence is declared. In cases where defendants respond to meds, trial is usually back on the table in some thirty-day increment, after the defendant has spent thirty, sixty, or ninety days inside. If it's bigger than a meds issue, Fryar could stay in for years. I could get a call a decade from now saying, “Hey, trial's back on.”

If the evaluation is to establish mitigation for sentencing, we should expect a plea to be forthcoming. That's what both Evan and Bill think will happen.

Evan promises that he'll press for a new court date tomorrow, working around a death-penalty case that the judge has coming up. I didn't realize that Pennsylvania still executes.

I wonder if Evan talks much to Georgia. I bet that she's doing what's expected: recoiling from the case, trying to avoid anything more to do with it. I feel like she's the kind of victim that the system is designed around. Evan's adapting to my intensity and need for interaction, but I assume that the other kind of victim is a lot easier to deal with.

Evan keeps offering up on my behalf the excuse that it must be hard for me to be so far away, across an ocean, in a very different time
zone, and so out of the loop. He understands how that could make a person anxious for facts to hold on to. I correct him that I would be just the same if I were in New Jersey or Philadelphia or even Pittsburgh itself. This is just the way I am. I want to know all that he's got.

I accept that I don't fit expectations, and didn't even back then. The stereotype is that victims scrub themselves raw under hot water, but I remember that I refused to shower afterward, for at least a day and maybe a few. I couldn't bear to take my clothes off. I wanted to stay dressed forever.

I remember an oversized black cardigan handed down from a friend. I cuddled up in it every day for months. I think I've found one thing that I can definitively attribute to after the rape and not before: ever since then, I like to wrap myself up. Even now, it's such a sad time of year to me when it gets too warm to wear my woolen capelike serape. I like to be inside of it.