Lies of the Heart (2 page)

“
This defendant
pulled the trigger and shot Nicholas Burrelli directly in the face from a distance of three feet. He
smiles
and shoots Nicholas Burrelli right in the face!”

Richard shakes his head in disbelief again, turns and walks back to the jurors.

“You’re going to hear a lot of words repeated when the defense’s experts take the stand. Words like ‘awareness’ and ‘diminished capacity’ and ‘moral culpability.’ And a lot of people are going to sit in that witness chair and talk about the defendant’s childhood, about the difficulties he’s had to face in this life. But most of all,” Richard says, his voice an octave lower, eyes narrowed, “they’re going to tell you that because the defendant is a mentally retarded man, he shouldn’t be held responsible for his actions. Because he’s mentally retarded, he doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong. Because he’s mentally retarded, he didn’t know what he was doing the day he murdered Nicholas Burrelli, and that he shouldn’t be sitting in a court of law today. You’re going to hear a lot of things that make you doubt that moment when Mr. LaPlante executed Nick, but will you all promise me one thing?”

Two female jurors in the back row are nodding in sync.

“Will you remember that moment? Will you remember that moment when he walked straight up to Nick,
smiled,
and then shot him in the face? Not for me, but for all the people Nick tried to help, day after day? Not for me, but for Nicky’s wife, Katie, who is sitting right there in the front row, a widow at only thirty-two years old—”

She knows that Richard is pointing at her, that his face is filling with practiced sympathy, but Katie has closed her eyes, is counting seconds again now that the words about that day have stopped. But there are two targets for her rage now, and all she can think of is the kind of permanent damage that can be inflicted with fingernails, teeth.

And then, like it has so many times in the past six months, the simmering rage begins its inevitable mutation, it transforms from a fierce red pounding into something else, something heavy and colorless—a melting that spreads inside her like the slow, cold flooding of a basement.

Dead. She’s here because Nick is
dead.

And then all she can do is cover her face with both hands, and let the tears rise.

“
Kay-tee.
”

They’re trying to handcuff Jerry, but he’s waving a piece of yellow paper high into the air; he darts his head past the bailiffs and court officer, past Donna, who attempts to snatch the paper away. Jerry’s blue eyes are searching for Katie’s.

“Okay, Jerry, okay,” Donna says.

“It is for
her,
” Jerry says, hand still high and waving. Before Katie can blink it away, she thinks how proud Nick would be if he were here: even under pressure, Jerry remembers to enunciate carefully.

“I’ll give it to her, okay? Jerry?”

Jerry’s supporters from the Warwick Center, packed into the rows behind the defense table, watch in mute shock until Donna sends an urgent look over her shoulder; immediately there is movement forward, soft encouraging words, hands reaching out. Katie reacts physically to these sounds and motions, to these people who were once her friends—the impossible weight of betrayal settling inside her stomach and chest until she feels the tears gathering again, just from the simple, familiar sight of Judith Moore, a volunteer from the cafeteria, impatiently swiping at her bangs. Or Veronica Holden, the work program’s receptionist and probably her closest friend at the center, lifting her arm to pat Jerry—her wooden bracelets slipping down her arm, making that clunky noise Katie knows so well.
Just last spring,
she thinks,
I borrowed them for a wedding.

But she indulges only briefly in this heaviness that cements her to her seat, in feeling sorry for herself, because then she locates it again: the sharp, exacting comfort of anger. It’s become a constant in her life now, this back-and-forth, the sadness and then the sizzling antagonism. The newness of reaching out to this anger is unsettling at times, so unlike the way she’s dealt with conflict before, but also utterly effective: the tears are gone now. She sits back on the bench, crosses her arms.

The bailiffs finally get Jerry cuffed, reddened faces betraying their frustration, and Katie allows herself a longer look. His chest is wider than both bailiffs put together, it looks like he’s going to burst right out of the dark blue suit she and Nick bought him for his forty-second birthday last year. His thinning brown hair has been neatly combed and parted to the left side, and there are red bumps on his cheeks and chin from a quick, careless shave. Jerry’s eyes, lost in the roundness of his face, are pinned onto hers.

The people and the sounds in the room recede instantly. All she can do is stare back.

“
Kay-tee,
” he whispers, low and urgent, “it is
me.
”

He’s been medicated. Katie recognizes the droopiness in the eyelids, the way his fleshy lower lip hangs, the paleness in his plump face. Like that time she gave him Dramamine out on the boat, right before the air show started above Narragansett Bay—the gentle rocking causing havoc deep inside Jerry’s belly. She remembers how he scanned the sky with troubled eyes that day, the way he pointed. “God up there,” he said, his other hand on his stomach, and both Katie and Nick knew what he meant: every pain he felt was an indictment, a punishment for things he couldn’t understand. He took the Dramamine from Katie without question, fell asleep in the cuddy long before the fighter jets roared overhead. But she remembers how hard he fought it, how that sleepy face searched out hers and Nick’s and the pale sky with drowsy excitement—the terror of sin and punishment temporarily forgotten once again.

And now those sleepy eyes are penetrating hers, asking a hundred questions, and it happens in a flash: she sees the bullet enter and move through Nick’s brain, she watches Nick forget her and everything they shared together, the furious path of the bullet erasing both of them, inch by inch.

Confusion in every blink of his eyes, in every movement of Jerry’s head as he turns right and left, guided by both bailiffs to the side exit. She remembers holding him when that look came during the nights, his sloppy sobbing and sniffling, the way his long arms wrapped around her and hugged her so tight, so tight.
God come tonight, Kay-tee? He come and get me tonight?
She knows all about the concentrated pain that settles inside Jerry’s head sometimes, the chaos and panic that comes back to him in the darkness. She knows exactly how small and afraid this enormous man feels when his eyes look just like that.

She pulls her eyes from his, turns away.

Later, in the courthouse bathroom, Katie is patting her face with a brown paper towel in front of the mirror when Donna Treadmont walks in.

“Mrs. Burrelli?”

Katie watches Donna’s approach in the mirror. She knows that the director of the Warwick Center has handpicked Donna from the Protection and Advocacy office because Donna looks like someone’s mother, like she’d look more comfortable with an apron around her thick middle and holding a pan of warm cookies. Donna’s purse is probably full of Band-Aids and safety pins and hard, stale peppermints, Katie thinks, and then she sees the yellow piece of paper in Donna’s hand.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Donna says. Her lipstick is pale pink, the color of cotton candy.

“I don’t want him talking to me,” Katie says.

“Of course—”

“I mean it. He shouldn’t talk to me. Ever.”

“Okay.”

“You’re his lawyer, and it’s up to you to make him understand that.”

“Yes.”

They watch each other in the mirror for a moment. Donna looks away first, pats the back of her graying permed hair, and presses her pink lips together.

“Anyway, he made this for you,” Donna finally says, trying to smile. Her eyes skip to the door and back.

Katie turns from the mirror to face her, automatically takes the extended piece of paper.

“I know this is unusual,” Donna says, but Katie’s eyes are already scanning the picture in her hand.

She follows the lines of Jerry’s boxy, crooked house—the loopy smoke curling out of the chimney, the rectangle door with a big circle in the middle for a doorknob, the two squares for windows above the door. The house lists to one side like it’s about to topple over, and there, in the front yard, is a snowman with a long triangle nose, button eyes, a top hat. Standing beside it are three stick figures holding stick hands: a medium-size one on the left, a small one on the right, a big, towering one in the middle. They all have U-shaped smiles that extend out of the circle of their faces.

Katie and Nick used to have dozens of these pictures taped all over their house, pictures of boats and seagulls, and snowmen, and big turkeys made out of the tracings of a big hand—all different except for the stick figures in each, the three people who are always holding hands, always smiling so widely it reaches past their faces. She stares at the picture, blinks hard a few times.

Donna places her hand on Katie’s arm. “He’s so confused,” she says, and Katie nods quickly, keeps her eyes on the picture. “I try to comfort him, but . . . but he keeps asking me if God is going to come and get him.”

Katie’s left shoulder jerks forward involuntarily—even now it’s organic, this sudden, corporeal impulse to race to Jerry’s side. But then Katie focuses on the medium stick figure, on the stick fingers that reach out—on the wide, curving smile.

And then she feels him again, the weight of his arm slung casually across her stomach in the night, the heat of his thigh as it brushes against hers.

It’s like getting punched in the stomach, every time. Every time she thinks about Nick, and hears his name inside her head, and pictures his dark eyes looking into hers. It happens a dozen times a day, a
hundred,
and every single time it’s the same—it’s just like getting punched.

She looks Donna in the eye. “Why?” she says, just above a whisper.

“You know his history, his fears at night—”

“No,” Katie says, shaking the paper at her.
“Why?”

It’s a relief to say it out loud, this one word that runs in a constant loop inside her head—especially to this woman, who might actually
know
the real reason Jerry did it. But the relief drains quickly, because Donna is stepping back, shaking her head.

“You know I can’t discuss the particulars of Jerry’s case with you.”

“Then what do you want?” Katie almost spits at her.

Donna takes another step back. “He just—Jerry just wanted you to have the picture. I promised him.”

Katie’s eyes move back to the paper.

Nick. Still inside the frame, still smiling, even after Jerry has taken him away.

“Could you tell him something for me?” Katie says quietly.

“Yes, of course.”

“Please tell him that I did this,” she says. Katie raises the paper to eye level, rips it in half.

Even after Donna has walked out, Katie is still ripping the pieces in half, and in half again, until they are too thick to tear.