Lies of the Heart (21 page)

—Potshots at my cooking? How original.

—You know what makes it worse?

He poked her hip lightly, menacingly, through the covers, waiting for an answer, but Katie only pulled them tighter around her body and tried to sink deeper into the bed.

—You don’t even realize, he said, what it’s doing to your body. I can’t even look at you when you undress lately.

—Keys, Nick. This is about
keys.

But it was too late. He towered over her, sneering his disgust.

—You know how embarrassed I was at dinner the other night? Running into my colleagues like that? “I’m so proud to introduce you all to my ambitious,
beautiful wife.
”

—Nick . . .

—What I should do is just point at you, tell them the condom broke and before I knew it we were in a church. Then they’d get it.

There was always this threshold, the anger ending suddenly, the tears rising.

—Why are you such an asshole? she whispered.

—Better than being a
fat, lazy cunt.

Later Katie would stand in the mirror, eyeing her trembling body, or review footage of her work, vainly trying to see the potential she had seen only the day before. Or call her mother just to check in, her hand shaking as she held the phone tight to her ear. This after she had forgotten to pick up his pressed shirts from the cleaners. Nick reminding her, only minutes after her admission, that her mother didn’t even seem to
like
her sometimes.
Who could blame her, really, Katie? When she has Dana for a daughter?

Hating him at that moment, hating
herself
for revealing so much about her life, her fears and doubts. Hating that she felt this way about the one person who was supposed to understand and then help chase them away.

Such innocuous beginnings. Why couldn’t Katie fill the gas tank once in a while? Why did Nick throw his sweaty workout shorts right next to the hamper instead of
inside
the hamper? And yet at times these small arguments would ferment and explode, and soon Katie was the one watching with round, shocked eyes: Nick looming over her, hurling petty insults and accusations with an instinctive, explosive rage that startled her each time. Nothing was off-limits, and her husband fought like a cornered dog, chewing his way into every soft, vulnerable spot Katie had ever revealed to him in the shadows of their bedroom. Tearing into susceptible places he had intuited on his own, or even—after time—created himself. (Was Katie really getting fat? The scale said only five pounds in over three years, but her thighs . . .)

Whenever their minor fights turned into this—not often, but enough,
enough
—Katie couldn’t take her eyes off Nick. Furious and wounded, she was also eerily fascinated by the way his body seemed to change right before her: face twisting up, shoulders an inch higher and pushed forward, legs firmly planted. As if
he
were the one being attacked with words sharp as slivers of glass. Her husband, fists tight at his sides, offering new glimpses of himself—spawning even more questions about the life he kept from her.

No, Katie never laughed about these with Dana, rolling her eyes and brushing the fights away like crumbs. Because they gathered inside her—Nick’s cruel words, the cheap, exacting shots finding their mark again and again.

Only after he left, only after she had thought of her own punishing words (too late), would she wonder: where did it come from? But only after she could stop hating him long enough to understand that she didn’t do anything, really, to provoke him to such an extent. Or did she? She wanted to ask Dana these questions, because it was Dana’s job to understand people, to understand the source of pain and fear and therefore anger.

Still, Katie was too embarrassed to ask Dana anything, to tell her sister how heartless Nick could be simply because she had forgotten to roll up the car windows before a thunderstorm.
That’s the difference between going to college for a real degree and going to college to watch movies. Simple intelligence.
Tapping his head, his thin, knowing smile before he turned away.

And she never told Dana how easily she accepted Nick’s tormented apologies later, the way he would hover around her, his body quivering, begging for her forgiveness.
I’m so sorry, I don’t know why—Katie, no please look at me—I don’t know why I do it—I love you—

She didn’t tell Dana how completely she loved her husband back in these moments, how her heart and mind wrapped around his unspoken pain and what he said, how his love for Katie shone in his tortured, beautiful eyes—how this proof of his feelings for her made Katie feel more at home in the world than she ever had before. Not alone anymore, never alone again, she would think, as he pressed for her forgiveness.

And she never told her sister how they would eventually come back together, their bodies tangling into each other, their mouths and fingers searching each other’s flesh as if for the first time. Nick’s pleading and moaning and grasping at her skin, the sheer relief and exhilaration of pure fucking, but with love and need and forgiveness all scrambled into the licking and biting and slapping of bodies.

When it was over, bodies spent, she would cradle her husband in her arms. Stroke his hair, whisper her forgiveness in his ear.

No, Katie never told her sister how powerful, how omnipotent, she felt in those moments either.

A
fter the 911 operator’s brief testimony in the afternoon, Judge Hwang calls for a fifteen-minute break. Katie signals to Richard, and he rolls his chair up to her; she looks at Daniel in the second row behind the defense table, then at Kirsten, who’s sitting beside Detective Mason and talking quietly with him at the end of her row.

“Remember,” she says to Richard, “Daniel gets very flustered around beautiful women. Nick told me once that he was painfully awkward with them, like he didn’t have a right to be in the same room.” She doesn’t add that Nick had only said this—during one of their explosive fights—so he could also tell Katie that Daniel was always perfectly at ease with her. “Your assistant,” Katie says, motioning in Kirsten’s direction, “she’s got all that gorgeous blond hair.”

“That’s a great idea, Katie,” Richard says. “I should have thought of that. I could have her move to the center of the row. She’d be more visible there, don’t you think?”

“Right—” Katie says, turning to the girl. But Kirsten is already standing, already making her way to the middle of the row, toward Katie.

“Oh, did you already—” Katie begins.

“No, no, hold on.” He waits until Kirsten is standing right in front of him, looks up at her. “Don’t move around again,” he says firmly to her. “Stay right here throughout this testimony.”

Kirsten’s face is full of confusion. “I—”

“Katie just had a great idea,” he interrupts quickly. “I want this witness to see you the entire time. I’ll explain later.”

Kristen looks at Katie, turns back to Richard. Smiles faintly and sits down.

“I won’t move an inch,” she says.

“Mr. Quinlin, were you inside the courtroom earlier when the 911 operator, Ms. Delory, identified State’s Exhibit Five for the jurors?”

Daniel sits perched at the edge of the witness chair, holding the cassette tape between his thumb and middle finger out in front of him. His eyes dart quickly to Kristen, who leans forward over the banister, staring intently at him.

“I am—I was. Yes.”

“And you were, in fact, the person who called 911 on May fifth?”

“Yes.”

“You were the first one, besides the two Warwick Center clients and the custodian, Billy Zahn, to see Nick lying facedown on the floor?”

Daniel struggles for a moment, his face flushing slightly, and Katie turns to Kristen. She is twirling her hair absently and smiling at him. Across the room Patricia frowns deeply at Daniel, then turns in Kristen’s direction.

“Mr. Quinlin?”

“Yes. Yes, I was there.”

“Can you tell the jurors what led up to that moment?”

Daniel breaks eye contact with Kristen, turns to the jurors. “I heard the gunshot. I . . . I jumped up. Billy met me in the doorway. He said Nick was shot. I could hear Joey howling,” he says, “so I grabbed my cell phone and ran out there.”

“And Joey is the client who can’t speak, is that correct?”

“He could a little, but mostly he made noises to communicate,” Daniel says, and then blurts out, “But he was getting better.”

The jurors eye him curiously—Daniel’s behavior appears oddly defensive, like he’s hiding something.

“He was getting better with Nick’s help?”

“Yeah.”

“And now?” Richard asks softly.

Daniel lowers his head, examines his splayed hands.

“Objection, Your Honor. Relevance?” Donna says.

Richard turns to Judge Hwang. “Your Honor, without Nick’s constant attention and professional help, this unfortunate boy had to be removed to an institution—”

“Objection, Your Honor! What does this have to do with—”

“Yes, okay.” Judge Hwang waves a hand in Donna’s direction. “Stick to the relevant issues, Mr. Bellamy.”

Richard nods and proceeds to walk Daniel through the crime scene, how he told Billy to get Carly and Joey out of the gym, what happened once the paramedics and police arrived. After a few minutes, when they get into the logistics of the 911 call, Daniel starts to stutter slightly, and Katie has a moment of regret: it was Daniel who fought to keep Nick in this world, Daniel who pumped Nick’s chest and put his lips against Nick’s and shared his breath until the EMTs arrived.

“Mr. Quinlin,” Richard asks, “how far is the gym from your office in the recreation building?”

“Down a long hallway, at the very back.”

“And how much time did it take you to get down that hallway and into the gym on May fifth?”

“I don’t know.”

“No? Well, in fact,” Richard says, “Detective Mason timed both you and Billy running to and from your office from the gym, didn’t he? And he figured that the time between the actual shooting and the time it took for Billy to tell you about it and for you to get up and race into the gym was approximately twenty-five seconds, right?”

“Something like that,” Daniel answers.

“Okay. Can you tell me what that defendant”—Richard stabs his finger toward Jerry—“was doing when you entered the gym and saw Nick lying on the floor, facedown and dying?”

“He—Jerry wasn’t there.”

“Less than twenty-five seconds after the shooting, and the defendant wasn’t anywhere to be found?”

“Objection, he’s answered the question.”

“Sustained.”

“Okay, well, Mr. Quinlin, did you wonder where the defendant was?”

“There was so much going on—”

“And the defendant was smart enough to take advantage of that chaos and get out of there before the police arrived?”

“Objection!” Donna roars, rising.

“Withdrawn,” Richard says. “Thank you, Mr. Quinlin.”

Donna stands in front of the jury, her hands clasped in front of her, blocking Daniel’s view of Kristen.

“Did you eventually get to see Jerry after the police arrived, Daniel?”

“Yes, I did,” he says, more confident now.

“And will you describe his demeanor at that time?”

“He was a mess, he was so confused—”

“Objection,” Richard says, “goes to state of mind.”

“Sustained.”

Donna shoots a look at Richard, turns back to Daniel. “Where
was
Jerry then?”

“He was in the time-out room in the work program.”

“And can you describe that room?”

Daniel describes it—a narrow, empty room, more like a long closet with bright fluorescent lights overhead.
Like something in a psych ward,
Katie had complained to Nick once, but he had only shrugged.

“And did you ask Jerry why he was in the time-out room?”