The Laws of Gravity (27 page)

“Julian,” the judge said. “Is there any reason you feel you can’t speak freely?” He inclined his head toward Nicole and her lawyer without mentioning them by name.

“It’s fine,” Julian said. “I don’t care who hears me.”

The judge nodded at Katrina, who strode toward Julian. “How old are you?” she asked

“I’m eleven,” he said. He frowned at her as if to say,
We already established that
.

“Do you know Nicole Greene?” she asked.

“She’s my father’s cousin,” he said.

“Her children are your cousins?”

“She only has one child, but yes. Daisy is my cousin.”

“Do you know what cord blood is, Julian?”

“I looked it up on Wikipedia,” he answered. “Cord blood is blood that stays in the placenta and the umbilical cord after birth.”

“Very good,” she said. Katrina laughed, and her laughter was rich and silvery, like bracelets jangling together. “Do you understand that you might need a cord blood transfusion someday?”

“I don’t want it,” said Julian. “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”

Ari jolted upright as if someone had administered an electric shock. The elderly court recorder stopped typing on her machine and looked at the judge for an instant, her eyebrow raised. Katrina moved forward, quick as a snake. “Your Honor, I object,” she said.

“Overruled,” Sol said, just as quickly.

“I don’t want the blood,” said Julian. “It’s mine, and I should have some say in the matter. I want it to go to Aunt Nicole. She needs it. I don’t.”

“She is not your aunt!” Ari called.

“My cousin,” Julian corrected himself, his voice shaking now.

“You understand that this cord blood is being kept for your own benefit?” Katrina said. “Yours and your sister’s.”

“I understand that,” Julian said. “But I really don’t give a crap.” For the first time now, he sounded like his father. “One of these days I’m going to turn twenty-one, and it’s going to belong to me. And I swear to God I’ll flush it down the toilet. I swear I will.—Arianna doesn’t need it. I don’t need it, I’m not sick. I wish I’d never been born!”

The judge thought of the famous Jewish dictum, “Best of all never to have been.” He said nothing. The boy’s hands had come unclasped and were now leaning on the edge of the table, gripping the wood.

“I don’t want it!” he shouted. “Will someone please, please listen to me?”

“Calm down,” Katrina said stiffly. “We are listening very carefully to your testimony—including, most importantly, Judge Richter.”

“You’re hearing my voice, but I don’t believe any of you are listening. I don’t want the goddamn cord blood!”

“Shhh,” the father interrupted. “You are too young to know what you’re saying. You’re too young to know what you really want.” He seemed more stricken than angry.

“Maybe you are too old to know what you want,” Sol said, taking himself by surprise. It was not his way to speak like this. Perhaps it was himself he was really talking about. He felt everything slipping away, out of his control. “Mr. Wiesenthal, I am not going to tell you again not to comment on the witness’s testimony. Order in the court!” he added curtly, again speaking mostly to himself.

Nicole’s face was shining. She mouthed the words
Thank you
to Julian. He nodded, unsmiling. This was every bit as brave as the long-ago day she had dashed forward to protect her cousin and his dogs against the mongrel. Braver, she thought. Braver. We did all right with these kids. They’re going to be fine in the end. We did our job well. She was proud of herself, proud even of poor Ari. She wanted to throw her arms around them and go home.

“I’m done with this witness,” Katrina said with disgust.

“Counsel waives cross-examination,” Peter said.

Julian began weeping like the child he really was as he stumbled out of the court, Ari hurrying after him.

“I’m sorry!” Julian called tearfully to Nicole over his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. Nothing I say makes any difference to anyone!” That wasn’t entirely true. Carter Johnson stepped out of the way when Julian passed, and opened the door for the boy. He gave just the smallest hint of a salute, but it was a real salute nonetheless.

As soon as Nicole came home that afternoon, she dropped her bag on the floor and headed for the telephone. She didn’t allow herself time to think. She pressed the numbers of Mimi’s phone.

“We have to stop this,” she said, as soon as Mimi picked up. “We can’t let them do this to us anymore. I’ve never wanted to live without you, and I’m damned if I’m going to die without you.”

That Thursday when Julian came by to visit Daisy, he held a big wrapped box in his hands. Daisy was dancing by the front window, watching him come up the front walk.

“What is it, what is it, what could it be?” she asked.

“It’s a Wii!” Julian announced as soon as Daisy had yanked open the door. “With a sports game and a racing car game and a dancing game. I’m not doing the dancing game.”

Daisy was too busy screaming to hear the rest.

“Julian, thank you,” Nicole said. She couldn’t bring herself to say any more. She hugged him instead, tears in her eyes—but she hadn’t taken her eyes off Mimi, who was still inside the car, trying to get the parallel parking right. She never has learned how to line up the wheels of her car, Nicole thought. That’s something I can still teach her.

“I don’t know how to set it up,” Daisy said.

“It’s easy as lemon pie,” Julian said, with eleven-year-old superiority. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

Mimi managed to get the car more or less parallel to the curb and was struggling out, holding her own bag of packages, in the kind of enormous bright foil gift bag Nicole’s mother had always used. She was wearing a shearling jacket and a boy’s-style gray watch cap—in fact, probably one of Julian’s hats. Nicole had to keep herself from running out into the snow. She waited for Mimi to get to the front steps, then flung the door open. Her heart was beating joyfully.

“I brought presents,” Mimi said, setting down the bag.

“So I see,” said Nicole. “What for?” She watched Mimi sizing her up, trying to hide her shock, her dismay at the change in Nicole, trying simply to smile. I know I’m dying, she wanted to say. It’s all right, it’s not as bad as you think.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mimi said, swiping the hat off her head and cramming it into her jacket pocket. “For the new year. Valentine’s Day. Something.”

Nicole put both hands on her friend’s shoulders. She looked straight into those familiar brown eyes, the straight dark brows above them, her slightly crooked nose. “Lordy, lordy,” Nicole said. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Mimi half smiled, but her eyes filled with tears.

“I’m so sorry,” Nicole said. “I’ve missed you.”

“No. I’m the one who’s sorry.” Mimi pressed her wet face against Nicole’s shoulder.

“Okay, it’s a tie,” Nicole said. The two friends hugged and swayed back and forth a long time as if dancing, without speaking. They didn’t let go till the kids hollered at them to come downstairs. Daisy stood at the bottom of the stairway, studying them. She rolled her eyes at Julian, but looked triumphant.

“Look!” she yelled. “Our mothers are in love.”

Sol had decided to write the blood case decision without help. He wanted this last case to be entirely in his own words. Flannery had composed a draft weeks before, and Sol tossed it in the garbage now without looking at it. Then, thinking of Sarah, he relented and put it into the paper recycling bin, still unread.

Sol struggled over the wording of this decision as if finding the right language might give him a clear conscience and direction. Justice, he knew, often depended on making the least damaging of two choices. Sol had given up his wide-eyed idealism long ago. Before he even got out of law school. Legal idealists were demagogues. They were more dangerous than the worst legal mind. The law was fallible because it was an invention of fallible creatures.

He had built his professional life on logic and precedent, and as long as he followed where they led, he felt he was in relatively safe territory. This had happened time and time again, over the years. Truth will spring forth from the earth, in the words of the Old Testament. But it evaded him now. He could not wrestle any meaning from the tangle of legalese. The harder he tried, the worse it sagged, snared in formal language like an animal caught in a trap.

His judgment was a death sentence, he knew that, written in what felt like a dead language. He tried to add something of Flannery’s ornate style, but somehow that only made matters worse. Now the thing was not only dead but flowery. A eulogy. In despair one night, Sol showed Sarah what he had written.

Sarah was in the midst of what Sol thought of as her Jewish phase. Twice a week she attended the bat-mitzvah class, but the rest of the time she studied on her own, head down, reading glasses falling to the end of her nose. Between her studies and the time she spent with Iris, she seemed happier, more self-sufficient, than she’d been in years. Now she examined her husband’s written notes closely, as if they, too, were Talmudic commentary, her chin propped in her hand. The lamplight glinted on her short gray hair. Finally she looked up.

“What are you trying to say?” she said.

Sol groaned and reached for the papers. “That bad,” he sighed. “Jeez.”

“No. Sol. Forget the writing a minute. Just tell me what it is you’re trying to say.”

He felt like an unprepared actor whose script had been snatched away. He tried to remember how the written decision began. “After due deliberation, it is the opinion of the Supreme Court of Nassau County, in accordance with—”

“In your own words,” she interrupted. “Say it in English.”

“Okay.” He started again. “I’m trying to say—I
want
to say that it’s impossible to force body parts or bodily fluids to be taken from one person and given to another without consent. Even if it saves a life. Legally speaking, it’s a slippery slope with horror at the end of it. Nonetheless, I want the defendant to carefully consider what he is doing. It’s up to him, we can’t force him from his path no matter how much we may detest him for it.”

“I don’t think you can say ‘detest,’” Sarah said. “But I get the idea.”

“How about ‘despise’?”

She pointed at the sheaf of papers in his hand. “Start fresh. You have nobody to impress; just be as clear as possible. Tear up the old draft. Write it down pretty much the way you just said it to me, add anything else you think you’ve left out, and let Ned take care of the legal language. It’s a hard thing, Solly. I’m sorry your last case had to be so hard.”

She hardly ever called him Solly. Only in their tenderest moments. “Thanks,” he said gruffly. “This is why you were such a good teacher.”

She looked at him over her glasses, her eyes wide. “Was I?”

“Oh, Sarah,” he said. “Love of my life. If you knew even the half of it.”

The Decision

“All rise,” Zimmer, the part clerk, said. “All manner of Men who stand bound by recognizance or who otherwise have proceedings before the Honorable, the Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, here holden this day for Nassau County, may now appear and they shall be heard.”